Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Accidental DBA is a term most IT pros are familiar with, and traditionally it describes an “on-top task” for the SysAdmin. It was followed by the “involuntary security admin,” a task carried out by network admins, as back in the days it was all about securing the perimeter. Now there are the clouds, but whose responsibility is it? Surely the SysAdmin again, as it’s just about infrastructure? But then there’s VPNs and BGP and load balancers—network territory!

When COVID-19 hit in the spring and schools quickly transitioned to remote learning, we saw in real-time how important IT departments in education are. It was IT’s quick thinking that helped administrators, teachers, and students continue in their learning environments. Now that the ‘20-’21 school year is ramping up, it’s important that IT leaders in education continue on the path to success and plan for the expected and unexpected.

Errors and bugs are a nightmare for any software engineer or developer. Even though errors can seem like a bad experience for any developer or website owner, errors can help improve the quality of a website. You may be wondering, “But how?” Errors pinpoint the weaker parts of the website, giving you direction of what to work on.

2020 keeps on proving the old adage, “It gets worse before it gets better.” We still seem to be in the “worse” stage. If you’ve been paying attention to the news—and I don’t blame you if you’ve been taking a break for sanity’s sake—you might have noticed (in addition to the reports about the pandemic and social issues) hacks and general security breaches have been ramping up.

Cloud computing can be more complex than anticipated, particularly as agencies continue to move applications and operations into a cloud environment. Does your federal IT team have the in-house skills to ensure cloud computing is helping your agency rather than draining its money and resources?

In a perfect world, how would like to learn about a problem? If you’re like the development team here at SolarWinds® Papertrail™, none of these options sound good. We’d all prefer to be notified when something starts to fail, but before there’s a service impact. At a minimum, we want to know the instant a service or application goes down. Fortunately, Papertrail has some powerful and easy-to-use alerting capabilities.

When IT professionals change jobs, it isn’t always a smooth and easy transition. Let’s say you worked somewhere else for a couple of years and got used to the environment you worked in. It was your kitchen; you knew what was in each drawer and where to put everything away. And even though the technology will be the same at your new job (the network is the network, after all), there will still be significant differences.

A lot happened last quarter, so you might have missed a few of the shiny new features now included with SolarWinds® AppOptics™. Don’t worry, we rounded up the recent updates here so you can get the most out of your application performance monitoring (APM) with AppOptics. Simplified Application Root Cause and Service- and Trace-Level Root Cause Summary Views The new service- and trace-level views expand the types of IT professionals who can use AppOptics.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why you don’t need a blockchain. Blockchain is one long transaction log that always gets written to and is never backed up. It’s a ledger, more or less, with some math. And while distributed ledgers can be useful for some scenarios, I’m here today to say you still don’t need a blockchain. What turns a distributed ledger into a blockchain is cryptography for creating a digital signature to reduce the risk of data tampering.