Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Investigating your family tree can be an interesting experience. For example, what if you discovered you were related to a famous person who won a Nobel Prize or performed a heroic act? Conversely, what if you realized you had an ancestor who was an infamous criminal? Much like examining your genealogy can be an exciting adventure, looking at the family tree of your database can prove to be just as rewarding. Databases occasionally undergo a phenomenon known as drift.

That’s what they say. Bring it on. I’m ready for this. I’m prepared. But no one could prep for what happened and how things evolved, right? So is preparation not necessary after all? I’ve had numerous discussions with my colleague and fellow Head Geek Leon Adato about this topic, and we even created a video with the background theme of preparation vs. instant action. Leon is kind of a doctoral student in chaos theory—or so it seems—while I try to plan things out.

One of the easiest ways to increase query performance in SQL Server is to make sure it can quickly access the requested data as efficiently as possible. In SQL Server, using one or more indexes can be exactly the fix you need. In fact, indexes are so important, SQL Server can warn you when it figures out there’s an index missing that would benefit a query.

We may be biased, but we think we’ve had some great blogs that are informational, impartial, and (hopefully) not boring to read about all things related to what’s happening on the internet. Looking back at our blog—dating back to 2006—one series saw the limelight from 2012-2017: the state of the internet series.

“Cloud-first” has been a government imperative for many years, but the pandemic usurped this strategy, making “cloud-now” a priority. The results have been transformational. The cloud made wide-scale government telework possible, but it’s also given agencies the opportunity to test drive new cloud applications and experience the scalability and security benefits first-hand.

Ideally, database queries use the fewest possible resources: time, memory, bandwidth, etc. Lower resource consumption maps to better query performance. To find relevant data in a table, a database query relies on lookup operations, and a table index can help a query efficiently find the table values it needs. With an efficient, well-designed table index, a database query can find the table data it needs, avoiding the need to "scan"—or search through—all the table data.

End-user experience monitoring is a practice designed to track user behavior or actions while interacting with a website or web application. The data gathered by end-user experience monitoring helps measure the impact of website and device performance on the end user’s journey. A meaningful end-user experience can help improve the enterprise’s operational efficiency, troubleshooting processes, employee productivity, and overall business value.

The performance of your applications is a complex, multi-layered puzzle. Performance can be negatively impacted at the application layer or even by remote calls to networked services. However, the most common bottleneck for applications is the data storage layer. The most common data storage tier for applications is a relational database, whose performance can vary widely depending on query optimization.

Imagine every time you visited the service desk to submit a ticket, you were greeted by the boisterous drums from the medley of the Olympics—you’d feel like a gold medalist! Though a theme song may seem far-fetched, rolling out white glove treatment can elevate the service desk in the eyes of your users. Let’s explore how you can land a 10 out of 10 in service delivery by embracing more user-centric service management strategies.

Some classics never go out of style, like a good pair of boat shoes or cowboy boots, depending on where you live. In the logging world, syslog is this classic. For more than 30 years, the syslog protocol has been a standard for logging. When we talk to users about what type of logs they collect and how they send them to SolarWinds ® Papertrail ™ , syslog always comes up. “Our application logs and server system logs are sent to Papertrail.