SolarWinds Blog

A POwerful SHortcut to Automating Operations

12/23/19 A few years back I was working at a SaaS provider when we had an internal hackathon. The guidelines were simple: As part of your project you had to learn something, and yo…

Reducing SolarWinds DPM’s Agent Overhead With Partial Network Capture

12/23/19 This reduces our already-low overhead and enables higher accuracy in certain circumstances. Here’s a before-and-after image: To review, one of ways we measure production M…

What Is MongoDB’s _id Field and How to Use It

12/22/19 The MongoDB id field is fundamental to every collection in MongoDB, and, by default, it has some useful properties users can take advantage of when familiar with how id is…

Thoughts on the VividCortex Acquisition

12/20/19 I visited the Austin office this past week, my last trip to SolarWinds HQ for 2019. It’s always fun to visit Austin and eat my weight in pork products, but this week was b…

Say Kubernetes One More Time, I Dare You

12/20/19 Introduction OK, so the title is hardly original, apologies. But it does highlight the buzz for Kubernetes still out there not showing any signs of going away anytime soon…

Quicker Azure Monitoring, Linux Change Detection, New API Poller – SolarWinds Lab #82 (Part 2)

12/19/19 The first step in improving system monitoring and visibility is getting data flowing sooner rather than later. For systems engineers managing diverse resources, it can be …

5 IT Service Management Resolutions for 2020

12/19/19 For many, New Year’s resolutions emphasize a fresh start and becoming better versions of themselves; adopting a healthier lifestyle, being more organized, starting a busin…

Unplanned Obsolescence

12/18/19 As we head into the new year, people will once again start quoting a popular list describing the things kids starting college in 2020 will never personally experience. Exa…

Using User Access Management to Defend Against Insider Threats

12/17/19 According to the SolarWinds 2019 Cybersecurity Survey, cybersecurity threats are increasing—particularly the threat of accidental data exposure from people inside the agen…

[De]Constructing Cloud With Mike Pfeiffer — SolarWinds TechPod 021

12/17/19 On this episode of SolarWinds TechPod, our host Patrick Hubbard, SolarWinds Head Geek, is joined by Mike Pfeiffer, a twenty-year tech industry veteran who’s worked for som…

Don’t Let Technical Debt Be Your Company’s Subprime Loan: Mapping Your Way to Better Software

12/16/19 I was in the pub recently for the local quiz and afterwards, I got talking to someone I hadn’t seen for a while. After a few minutes, we started discussing a certain app h…

Holt-Winters Forecasting and Exponential Smoothing Simplified

12/15/19 Holt-Winters forecasting is a way to model and predict the behavior of a sequence of values over time—a time series. Holt-Winters is one of the most popular forecasting te…