Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: back in the days of vaudeville, comedy acts were all the rage. This young guy wants to get into the business, but he’s not sure his act is good enough. He knows all the great comedians of the time would put on a gorilla suit, and the audience ate it up. So the first time he goes up in front of an audience, he throws on the suit and prepares to walk out on stage.

In the first part of this series, we deployed a Django application on a DigitalOcean Droplet and created a simple Django application. To monitor our Django application, we installed the SolarWinds® APM Integrated Experience featuring AppOptics™, Loggly®, and Pingdom®. In the conclusion of this article, we’ll explore the different types of monitoring provided by the APM Integrated Experience.

Finally, the days are getting longer, the sun is heating up, and I’m able to spend all my free time outside soaking it in here in Austin, Texas. As I was laying out this weekend, I came up with a riddle for you: what do sunscreen, a life vest, and SolarWinds® Pingdom® have in common? Whether it’s real or metaphorical crickets I’m hearing, here’s the answer: proactivity.

Remember where your business was a year ago? Remember where you were a year ago? How could anyone forget? As the seriousness of the pandemic became apparent, nearly every business experienced chaos and confusion. What was reliable and routine suddenly became ambiguous and unsure—in literally a day. Offices, factories, retail stores, and restaurants were shut down, and employees were sent home.

IT monitoring is a requirement of the modern IT organization for ensuring the health and security of all layers in the IT stack. But, as inclusive as organizations try to be when maintaining a vigil over the moving pieces in a network, some systems ultimately escape notice. But instead of accepting this as a cost of doing business, consider the task at hand: prevent the unseen from causing harm to IT infrastructures and to the business processes reliant on them.

IT pros lose precious time every day battling menial IT operations management (ITOM) tasks. ITOM covers the things needed to support the network infrastructure delivering IT services. This includes hardware like switches, servers, and firewalls in the data center or enterprise network and the tools needed to make sure everything runs optimally. According to the SolarWinds 2020 Cloud Confessions survey, 78% of tech pros report spending less than 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments.

Modern web applications can be complex. A typical application stack usually involves several components spread across different layers. For example, HTML5 and AngularJS can make up a site’s front end. User inputs and queries from the front end can be passed on to containerized microservices running on a middleware, which in turn could pass the queries to a back-end database. Systems like WAFs and LDAP servers can be used for security and authentication.

We’ve reached the final piece of our five-part series, and while I’m sad to end it, I hope you or your DBA teams have learned enough to move forward with the Information Management Maturity Model (IMMM). Although there are five steps to this model, several DBAs stop at the fourth. It’s common for large organizations to give this step to management and higher-ups, rather than DBA teams.

Have you ever heard the mantra “Don’t deploy on Fridays?” There are blog posts, tweets, and t-shirts shouting this slogan to anyone who will listen. Maybe your organization follows this policy. The purpose of not deploying on Fridays is to give the team better work/life balance by preventing them from having to work on the weekends if something goes wrong during or after the deployment.

Modern web applications can be complex. A typical application stack usually involves several components spread across different layers. For example, HTML5 and AngularJS can make up a site’s front end. User inputs and queries from the front end can be passed on to containerized microservices running on a middleware, which in turn could pass the queries to a back-end database. Systems like WAFs and LDAP servers can be used for security and authentication.