-
December Writing Challenge Wrap-Up: Week 4
For many of us who make our career (if not our emotional home) in IT, this week was the beginning of a two-week respite from constant changes. Holiday vacation combines with a generate end-of-year risk-aversion when it comes to change and means we can take a moment to catch up on tasks, and maybe reflect a bit on the year.…
-
3 Ways IT Teams Can Manage Tool Sprawl
“Tool sprawl”—particularly in edtech—is an increasing challenge. My colleague Brandon Shopp (@bshopp), group vice president of product strategy at SolarWinds, has some great advice on how to keep edtech tool sprawl in check. Since schools transitioned to remote learning, districts have added or upgraded their IT education…
-
Enterprise Cost Containment
H.L. Mencken once famously wrote, “…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” More than just a pithy way to frame the entire concept of “cost containment” (whether network-specific cost, the broader category of IT, or the cost of anything else, to be quite honest), it’s an…
-
Geekly World News: October 2021
I’m excited for October! Here in Texas, October brings the Texas Renaissance Festival [Ed. note: HUZZAH!] in addition to our usual Halloween shenanigans. I’m happy to once again be working on costumes, and looking forward to my annual watching of Hocus Pocus. I hope you’re all looking forward to some fun in October as…
-
International Podcast Day With the Head Geeks
International Podcast Day began in 2015 to celebrate the audio medium around the world. The day is meant to acknowledge and appreciate all who make podcasting possible—from the hosts to the fans, podcasts wouldn’t be possible without audio enthusiasts of every shape and size. To commemorate this international holiday,…
-
How to Avoid Monitoring Overload: Syslogs and SNMP Traps
If you’re using network monitoring solutions (regardless if it is an enterprise size or designed rather for smaller environments) to digest log messages from your network devices, sooner or later you’ll likely notice some performance issues caused by the hundred-thousands (or even millions) of syslog messages and SNMP…
-
McCrory's Law: Data Gravity
I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for my friend, Dave McCrory's presentation at Interop during the Future of Data Summit. Dave is currently the CTO of Basho, and he famously coined the term "data gravity" in 2010. Data gravity, or as friends have come to call it, McCrory's Law, simply states that data is…
-
Speaking Up: Bridging the Space Between the Idea and the Publish Button
Podcasting is, and has been, the rage for a while now. What electronic self-publishing tools did to open up and democratize written content, podcasts have done for the area previously controlled by radio stations. Folks with a strong point of view and a desire to share it are often caught up short when it comes to the…
-
Avoiding Supply Chain Attacks With MSBuild SDKs
SolarWinds is a large organization with software written in many programming languages, but the core language for our flagship Orion® Platform is C#, which runs on the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Framework uses NuGet as a package manager. After the SUNBURST security incident in late 2020, we’ve focused extra…
-
The Other Side of the Mic
International Podcast Day is coming up, and, in case you missed it, SolarWinds has its own podcast called TechPod, so we want to celebrate! Much of the time one of us (Head Geeks) get to host the podcast, but today I want to talk about what it’s like to guest on a podcast. I want to preface this discussion by first…
