Latest SRE & DevOps Articles

The Left-Prefix Index Rule

02/05/19 There’s an important heuristic in database indexing that I call the left-prefix rule. It helps you understand whether the database will be able to make the best use of a m…

The Changing ITSM Landscape: Focusing on Employee Satisfaction

02/05/19 Learn why your IT strategy should shift focus and include customer experience and employee service management techniques. The post The Changing ITSM Landscape: Focusing on…

Is it Time to Have Another Look at Your Monitoring Solution?

02/05/19 Think about the last time you had an outage or service interruption in your IT environment. When did you first discover the outage? How long had it been going on? What was…

SolarWinds Named a January 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for APM Suites

02/04/19 We are excited to announce that SolarWinds® AppOptics™ and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) have been recognized as a January 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Custo…

Covering Indexes in MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB

02/01/19 A covering index is a fantastic query performance optimization. An index covers a query when the index has all the data needed to execute the query, so the server can retr…

IT Alerting Best Practices: Notification Routing for IT Ops

02/01/19 It’s easy to overlook the next step of your monitoring deployment: notifications. Usually, one of two things will happen: You get too many alerts, and subsequently turn of…

The DevOps Slide: Shift to the Left

01/31/19 A culture of collaborative and continuous learning. Transparent knowledge sharing. Agile methods and automation as a means of accelerating innovation. Building good softwa…

What IT Service Management Pros Should Know About CX (Customer Experience)

01/31/19 Discover key concepts of integrating customer experience (CX) management into your IT service management strategy and how it can improve your employee services. The post W…

The Iron Triangle of Sorting, Indexing, and Temporary Storage

01/30/19 Databases have a kind of iron triangle for specific types of query plans, whereby they can pick between two out of three things but can’t get all three of them. (The “iron…

Head in the Sand About Cloud: Part 1

01/30/19 A recent argument on Twitter (“What?!” I can hear you exclaim, “People disagree on Twitter? This cannot be true!”) highlighted for me just how persistent people can be in …

Improving IT Security in a World Filled With Hackers

01/29/19 With hacker attacks taking place every thirty-nine seconds, ensuring your IT strategy has a bulletproof plan for IT security is crucial. The post Improving IT Security in …

Why Move to the Cloud? Benefits of the Ever-Onward Advancement of Hybrid IT

01/29/19 Why Cloud? I remember being asked this exact question during a technical presentation I got drafted into very last minute with a well-known, high street brand. During the …