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It's a Trap! Using SNMP Traps to Get your Network to Talk to You
You have a network, and it's your job to keep it running. How do you know it's doing what it should? You could just wait to hear from your users; surely your CIO will let you know when his "internet is broken", but this approach may not have a positive influence on your continued employment. No, you need some network…
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Reviewing the Business Cases for Network Configuration Management
Four predominant IT use cases any network device configuration management tool must address are: * Configuration change management: scheduling device configuration backups, requiring change approval for configuration changes, scheduling execution of approved changed. * Compliance reporting: defining and enforcing…
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Application Observability, The Next Step in Application Performance Monitoring
Efficiently managing the performance of complex cloud environments requires more than monitoring and alerting Today’s cloud environments rely on microservices, service meshes, containers, and orchestration tools and are too complex for traditional tools to measure and monitor performance metrics effectively. The number of…
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Writing Challenge Day 19: Overcoming Anxiety
When examined at a micro level, any one event in 2020 could send anxiety skyrocketing, let alone all of these events piling one on top of the other. Talk about an anxiety ball lodged in the pit of your stomach. Sure, we could curl up and wait for the madness to inch by at a glacial pace while the ball grows and grows. Or…
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Sysadmania! Is Upon Us!
SysAdmin Day is upon us, you SysAdmaniacs! It’s your day! We know how you may feel underappreciated at times throughout the year, so we went all out and created a board game in your honor. That’s right. Now, after another annoying day resetting passwords and resolving bottlenecks caused by I/O-heavy apps, you can unwind…
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The SolarWinds Guide to Work From Home: How Work Actually Gets Done
This may seem like one of the nitty-gritty questions for new remote workers, but it’s really simple: for the most part, you’ll get work done at home the same way you did in the office. Sure, you might have a few more emails than you did before, but otherwise, things are the same. You’re probably using a company system—or…
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Assessing the health and performance of your databases
By Paul Parker, SolarWinds Federal & National Government Chief Technologist Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database heath and performance. Part of the problem with managing databases is that many people consider database health and performance to be one and the same, but…
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Pardon the Interop-tion
I'm thrilled to be attending and engaging in Interop 2016, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas from May 2-6. Even better, I'm honored to say I'll also be speaking at the event: IT pros need to bridge any technology construct to business utility. Utility manifests as disruptive innovation…
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Ideas for Using Your MGT Act Funding
By Omar Rafik, SolarWinds Senior Manager, Federal Sales Engineering Here’s another interesting article with suggestions about how agencies might approach legacy application modernization and cloud adoption using MGT Act funds. Picking the “best” apps and systems will certainly increase success rates, and SolarWinds systems…
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If I Was a Grownup, This is the Essay I’d Write
Recently, my friend Phoummala Schmitt, aka “ExchangeGoddess” and Microsoft Cloud Operations Advocate, wrote about her struggles with imposter syndrome (https://orangematter.solarwinds.com/beating-imposter-syndrome/). It's a good read that I highly recommend. But one element of it stuck with me, like an itch I couldn't…