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Homelabs Hurt So Good
Are you guys running homelabs? I’m following /r/homelab and the other day, a discussion captured my attention about the people behind their homelabs, and even more so their intentions. As it turns out, most folks who work in IT use labs only when they prep for a certification, and that’s it. And it’s perfectly fine. When…
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Do You Remember Face-toFace Events?
Good old times: In the first six weeks of 2020 I traveled between Ireland, Texas, Spain, and Germany. In the first six weeks of 2021 I traveled between home and the grocery store across the street. Events and conferences had first been cancelled, and later “virtualised,” like most of our work meetings. Virtual conferences…
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Disaster Recovery - Focus on the disaster first!
When organizations first take on the challenge of setting up a disaster recovery plan, it’s almost always based on the premise that a complete failure will occur. With that in mind, we take the approach of planning for a complete recovery. We replicate our services and VMs to some sort of secondary site and go through the…
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Hello, World!
Actually, this is very, very true. In the past few months—since March, basically—I’ve visited 4 continents, countless nations, and talked to thousands of business partners, customers, new employees, and people with a general interest in what’s new at SolarWinds and how we’re doing. The obvious reason for all the travel was…
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Five Ways to Achieve IT Cost Optimization
With information technology taking over the world's business sector, it’s necessary to understand digital transformation. According to Gartner1, digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing) to digital optimization to the invention of new digital business models. The…
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Knowing Which Services Are Critical to a Business Service
In the age of exploration, cartographers used to navigate around the world and map the coastlines of unexplored continents. The coastline of IT, and moreover the inner landscapes and features, has become much more complex than a decade ago. The cost and effort needed to perform adequate mapping the old way has gone way…
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Geekly World News - July 2022 Edition
By the time this goes live, I’ll be happily on a family vacation in Florida, taking my kid into the fun realms of Marvel, Star Wars, Disney, Harry Potter, and more. He’s a great age to have fun at an amusement park with–old enough, we don’t spend all our time in the little kids’ section, and young enough, where everything…
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No, You Don’t Need a Blockchain
The hype around blockchain technology is reaching a fever pitch these days. Visit any tech conference and you’ll find more than a handful of vendors offering blockchain in one form or another. This includes Microsoft, IBM, and AWS. Each of those companies offers a public blockchain as a service. Blockchain is also the…
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Writing Challenge Day 2: Show Us Your Office Space
After over 20 years with the same company, I changed jobs. I started a new job in February 2020, and in early March, the new company moved the majority of the people out of the office. So like many others, I went to work at the house. At the house, there was an issue. I was in my wife’s way…all day. By the end of the week…
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IT Life Hacks for Monitoring
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…
