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How to Become Data Centric
According to Dr. Stephen Hawking and the conservation of quantum information theory, information can neither be created nor destroyed… unless you work in IT. OK, he didn’t really say the part about IT; I did. In the physical world, information is constantly generated, curated, and consumed—from emails to cat videos to this…
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Gamify Work: How to Apply Gaming Skills to Your Day Job (Part 2)
In my last Gamify Work post, I brought up the idea that you can translate skills from gaming to tech. All roles can benefit from the skills you use in everyday gaming. If you aren’t a gamer, I hope my analytical brain dump of my own recreational pastime inspires you to analyze your own hobbies and think about the skills…
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Geekly World News - May 2021
I can’t believe it’s already May! For me, 2021 seems to be flying by. Kids are soon to be out of school again, which means even less things to distract them during the day. Here in the U.S., we’ve been working on getting vaccinated, so we can see each other again soon. We’re looking forward to the day (maybe next year…)…
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CostOps: The Overlooked Developer Responsibility
Developers are the kingmakers. Millions of decisions made by tens of thousands of developers are ultimately responsible for the triumph or tragedy of IT. Developers for commercial vendors, open-source projects, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs), and internal teams make most…
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The SolarWinds Guide to Work From Home: Introduction
Like so many things at SolarWinds, this blog series arose out of a genuine desire to help our fellow IT practitioners by sharing our experiences and offering lessons we learned along the way. In this case, our goal wasn’t to help you monitor, manage, or automate your IT environment, but to simply wrap your head around the…
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Transact-SQL Script for Webinar "How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review"
In mid-April 2021, I presented a webinar on How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review. If you missed it, you can watch the webinar now on demand <How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review (sentryone.com)>. This session encapsulates the sort of content I would share with my own Dev teams back when I was lead of a large…
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3 Key Features Every Service Desk Needs
Modern enterprises must work to ensure their organization is focused on making employees feel heard and valued, and a key way to do this is through strong IT service management. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—today’s employees expect a similar service experience in the workplace that they encounter in their…
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Security Starts With People, Unfortunately.
One of the findings of our investigations pointed to a compromised account as a possible cause of the cyberoperation. While I was reading the results, I thought, “That could have been me. In fact, it could have been any of our employees,” and I began asking myself what I as an individual could do to increase the security…
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Hybrid IT and Virtualized Workloads Preparing for a Shift to Microsoft Azure
I really liked this piece by my SolarWinds® associate Brandon Shopp discussing how to prepare for a move to Azure, how to monitor performance, and how to control costs. Though government agencies continue to move to the cloud to accelerate their digital transformation plans, the majority have embraced a hybrid IT…
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Outdated Calculus of Cloud Cost Containment
Cost would seem to underpin almost every decision IT teams make. Sure, business requirements drive overall operations budgets, but it'’s always in tension with decades-old certainties about cost. It’s long been the unyielding constant of IT equations. In particular, IT pros migrating application infrastructures out of the…
