Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’m at an interesting point in my career. I’ve ridden all the rides and managed all the technology things like most ops engineers with some miles. Eventually, you realize—with a few notable exceptions—IT technology is a cycle in which enterprises reimplement the same business functions over and over again. And this realization forces a change.

Maybe you’ve been there. You’re a VP of engineering, or a product owner. There was a critical outage in one of your apps, and it took your team an entire week to track down and fix the issue. Customers and revenue were lost. Now you’re sitting in a review meeting with a consultant hired to figure out what happened and why.

Providing a top digital user experience is critical if you want to grow the number of visitors and keep them engaged. Anything you can do to improve your Drupal website will have an impact on your business and ultimately revenue. Luckily, there’s much you can do to optimize your Drupal website, including implementing a range of tools and services, and installing extra Drupal modules. In this article, we consider how to improve Drupal site performance.

In modern digital environments, logs are present everywhere. From networking devices, servers, and databases, to operating systems, cloud-based services, and applications, every component produces some form of digital records of events. These records or logs provide an audit trail for Security Information Event Management (SIEM) and help in performance monitoring of servers and applications.

You may have noticed some URLs have the added S after “http.” This means a site has SSL security. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It keeps sensitive information, like social security numbers, credit card numbers, login credentials, or medical records, from being intercepted by encrypting the data while it passes between servers. Now, you might be thinking, if I don’t sell things online then I don’t need SSL security. Think again.

Today every organization has invested in the cloud for higher agility, scalability, computing performance, and more. With self-service portals offering easier provisioning, cloud-based services and platforms have reduced operational overheads on IT teams significantly. Further, with cloud, organizations can choose pay-as-you-go plans without making any heavy upfront investments, get full visibility into their spending, and achieve a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Using a content management system (CMS) like Joomla instead of coding a site from scratch is a quick and effective way to create a website. Content management systems offer everything from flexibility and full control over your website to access to advanced features and functionality. These enable users to create beautiful and dynamic webpages. Whether you’re a complete beginner or an experienced web developer, you’ll easily be able to find a CMS suited to your skill set and project needs.

The other day I found myself trying to tune a Ruby on Rails app I had written as a side project. (The app lets me keep track of my favorite eateries and pubs. It’s searchable, includes multiple images, and has stored locations.) On past projects, I relied on SolarWinds® Papertrail™, path testing, a lot of trial and error, and a general feel to try to improve performance. This time I thought I would give SolarWinds AppOptics™ Dev Edition a try.