Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Although our Head Geek Leon Adato may have attempted to predict 2020 last year, no one could’ve prepared us for what was to come. Today as we work from various remote spaces including our living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, or any room where we can find a good Wi-Fi signal, it’s hard to think of what our situation will look like in 2021.

Raise your hand if you’re in IT and you’ve at some point in your career worked on the help desk. That’s what we thought. As the front lines of support for technology-related issues in the company, the help desk plays a critical role in keeping employees and the business up and running. Laptop keeps freezing? Bluetooth keyboard won’t connect? Dreaded BSOD? When employees run into these issues, they need help fast.

Of all the different sets of hacks IT pros pick up, monitoring may be the most wide-ranging area and therefore the hardest to nail down in a single blog. After all, how many network hack techniques are equally valid here? And therein lies the actual secret—the IT life hacks collected by monitoring experts have little to do with a specific technology or silo and much more to do with the philosophy and discipline of monitoring itself.

For educators, students, and parents, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning has been profound. Thousands of schools across the U.S. closed their doors this spring and made the shift to distance learning. It’s a model many weren’t prepared for. And with schools in full swing and the pandemic continuing, educators, administrators, school staff, and school district boards struggle with the right path forward.

While application performance monitoring can provide us with metrics on software use and delays, SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) was built to tell us stories as to why user behavior is the way it is in the database. Database performance monitoring for developers in the distributed cloud industry is an important practice for maintaining the best environment for your users.

Thanksgiving is just a couple days away for folks celebrating in the US, so what better time than now to share what we’re thankful for? Many of us are giving thanks for loved ones, health, a roof over our heads, and full bellies. We’re also paying homage to the unsung IT heroes and service providers in our organization who make our jobs easier—especially amid the unanticipated shift to remote work this year.

A networking problem can come from almost any fault within the infrastructure, whether it’s a bandwidth bottleneck, configuration issues, or a faulty networking component. But more than half of IT system outages are caused by hardware failure. The ability to quickly identify and resolve hardware issues goes a long way toward ensuring optimized performance. While this may seem like a simple solution, there are many, many potential hardware failure points, each of which can contribute to a slowdown.

Just imagine the current situation continues well into the foreseeable future—let’s merge reality with a little fiction. The apocalypse is over, but life has changed permanently. This means we’re going to wear masks in public transport, shops, and restaurants and follow sports events on television instead of in the stadium. But hey, beer is much cheaper at home anyway. Office jobs are outsourced, but not into countries with cheap labor—they’re outsourced to our own homes.

While marketing has done its job of getting prospects and customers to your site, the last thing you need is a performance issue to turn them away. If your site is unavailable or there’s an issue with critical transactions, you’re preventing customers from purchasing, using, or logging in to your product. Especially during the holidays and peak shopping season, when the expectations are high, you cannot afford downtime.

ITIL has established itself as the gold standard of guidelines for service management over the years. And with so many employees working remotely this year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the best practices and guiding principles of ITIL 4 are arguably more applicable than ever. The sudden shift to remote work for many organizations has forced teams to increasingly rely on technology and find new ways to convey important messages.