July 12, 2023
"SolarWinds is a community... It’s the best IT community I have ever been a part of, always people willing to chime in and help with a problem or a question." — Eric Hodeen CourtesyIT, SolarWinds Enterprise Monitoring Consultant, DoD
ABOUT COURTESYIT
CourtesyIT offers a range of IT Consulting and SolarWinds professional services designed to help organizations reach their potential. Eric Hodeen, owner and SolarWinds Enterprise Monitoring consultant, specializes in implementation, integration, and resolving issues, especially when it comes to working with compliance, DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), and similar frameworks for Department of Defense (DoD) clients.
BRINGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE TO THWACK AND CLIENTS
Throughout Eric’s career, he’s worked with SolarWinds products. He’s invested in SolarWinds and has been the top THWACK® community contributor since 2016. “SolarWinds is a community,” he says. “Every time we get a new person on THWACK, I enjoy talking with them and helping them get the most from THWACK for their SolarWinds modules [included in the SolarWinds Platform]. I recommend people start with the training videos and reach out to the community. It’s the best IT community I have ever been a part of, always people willing to chime in and help with a problem or a question.”
With this knowledge and his experience helping other THWACK community members resolve issues, Eric can assist his clients with their SolarWinds needs. “Clients come to CourtesyIT looking for help because they want to get more out of their SolarWinds Platform and need help sorting out the issues,” he says. “With my clients, we start with the server builds and mission requirements for their SolarWinds configurations and integrations; that way, the application runs much better and uses resources more efficiently. When clients mention slowness from the application, their SolarWinds modules are usually under-resourced and not tuned for their environment.”
Eric will dive into the network, infrastructure, and application modules included in the SolarWinds Platform to build the best solution to meet each client’s requirements. CourtesyIT seeks to use automation techniques in the application to allow network and system administrators to focus on other issues.
SERVING THE DOD WITH SECURITY AND SIMPLICITY
CourtesyIT’s clients utilize SolarWinds products because of their simplicity. “Clients want to be able to install SolarWinds and have it start returning data in a short period of time,” Eric says. “Clients usually do not have much time or resources to build or configure SolarWinds products. Because SolarWinds is easy to use, you only need a couple of pieces of information to get started and gain insight into your IT environment.”
Despite the simplicity, he’s faced clients uncertain about continuing with or returning to SolarWinds due to the SUNBURST attack in late 2020. But because so much of Eric’s work is with the DoD, he’s uniquely positioned to share the leaps and strides SolarWinds has taken to secure its solutions and customers.
Eric shares his clients, “The company has gone through a renovation with hiring processes and brought in many top-notch security folks. They’ve streamlined their security patches.” He also speaks to the security advancements important to DoD entities. “SolarWinds is more in line with the DoD and federal types of requirements (NIST ® , DISA) and they’ve put a lot more money toward securing the product and their processes.”
As ever, Eric believes SolarWinds products are designed with the user in mind, providing simple and effective solutions. Over the years, Eric continues to see these core goals in all his products. “I’ve been using SolarWinds since 1999—I remember when SolarWinds would send an application disk…. I am really happy with how the applications have matured [over the years], and the education of the community has grown.”
Location: San Antonio, Texas
SolarWinds Platform network monitoring functionalities in use:
- Compliance monitoring
- Availability and performance monitoring
- Configuration monitoring and management
- Traffic and bandwidth analysis
- User and device tracking
- VoIP and network quality monitoring
- Topology mapping
