Database

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 1)

10/03/13 The plan cache holds a great deal of information about the overall health of your database instance. You can use the plan cache to investigate current performance issues a…

100% Reproducible Builds in Go

09/10/13 This post was featured in our July 2015 anthology of most popular SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) blog posts of all time. One of the nice things about Go is …

Godaemon, a Library to Daemonize Go Apps

08/27/13 At SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor we have a specific need to daemonize one of our Go applications, which must safely run detached from terminals, with a working …

A tutorial on how to use Go’s database/sql package

07/22/13 We found ourselves wishing for a tutorial to complement the database/sql documentation in Go, so we wrote one and shared it on Github. Please send pull requests to contrib…

Streaming Approximate Histograms in Go

07/08/13 If you’re looking at response time, what’s more useful: a mean or a percentile? Not sure? You probably know how to calculate the average or mean of a sample, but what abou…

4 Statistical Process Control Rules That Detect Anomalies in Systems

06/26/13 Statistical Process Control (SPC), or using numbers or data to study the characteristics of our process to make it behave the way we want it to behave, has been around sin…

Quantifying Abnormal Behavior

06/25/13 At Velocity last week, I spoke about how we quantify abnormality in a system’s time-series metrics cheaply, in realtime, at high frequency. Note that this is not the same …

Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go

06/04/13 Not too long ago, my primary programming language was Perl. I’ve written a lot of Perl, including some things that I think are quite clever. And therein lies the problem. …

How Does Adaptive Fault Detection Work? Does It Eliminate Thresholds?

04/17/13 In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that we’ve developed th…

Using Socat to Simulate Networking Traffic to Test and Debug

04/15/13 If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data betwee…

Two Reasons Why Threshold-Based Monitoring Is Hopelessly Broken

04/10/13 Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a …

A Sure-Fire Recipe For Monitoring Disaster

04/09/13 In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyon…