/ Larry Smith, Jr.

Larry Smith, Jr.

Larry Smith, Jr.

Larry is a well-seasoned engineer with over 25 years of real-world experience in networking, compute, storage, virtualization, microservices, automation, Infrastructure as Code, and development. He is often referenced as the "floater" because of his ability to float between all pillars from deep level infrastructure and development. Larry is also very active on his contributions on GitHub, blogging, mentoring, and evangelizing. And most of all, his core belief is to "ALWAYS live outside of your comfort zone.”

The Latest Posts Featuring Larry Smith, Jr.

Inside the Black Box: Bridging the Database Observability Gap

Over the past 15 years, Agile and DevOps have accelerated application delivery, enabling faster, more reliable releases. Yet the database layer often remains a blind spot for observability and performance monitoring.

In this article, Kevin Kline shows why closing the database observability gap is critical to improving performance, efficiency, and resilience for DBAs, developers, and the businesses that depend on their data.

March 27, 2026
Database Podcast
Inside the Black Box: Bridging the Database Observability Gap
IT pro looks at computer and works
Application Dependency Mapping: Security and Ongoing ADM
December 19, 2018
Applications
Well, here we are. Finally, on the last post of this series. If you have not been following along, you can find the previous posts: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part…
Application Dependency Mapping
December 11, 2018
Network
So far in this series, we have covered Application Performance Monitoring. If you haven’t already, read part one, part two, part three, and part four. In the last post, we stressed the importance of…
Application Performance Monitoring: APM In An Agile World
November 21, 2018
Network
Hopefully, you have been following along with this series and finding some useful bits of information. We have covered traditional APM implementations in part one, part two, and part three. In this post,…
Application Performance Monitoring: Benefits and Examples
November 7, 2018
Applications
This is part three in this series. In part one and part two, we covered some of the basics. But in this post, we will dig into the benefits of…
Application Performance Monitoring: What Should We Be Monitoring? How Should We Be Monitoring?
October 31, 2018
Applications
What Should We Be Monitoring? To effectively begin getting a grasp on your applications performance, you must begin mapping out all the components in the path of your application. It…
Application Performance Monitoring: What is it All About? How Do We Get Started?
October 17, 2018
Applications
What Is It All About? You may or may not have heard of application performance monitoring or APM. You may also have heard the term APM used in the context…