In the age of exploration, cartographers used to navigate around the world and map the coastlines of unexplored continents. The coastline of IT, and moreover the inner landscapes and features,…
Knowing Which Services Are Critical to a Business Service
Disaster Recovery Testing – Learning to Walk the Walk
With the influx of natural disasters, hacks, and increasingly more common ransomware, being able to recover from a disaster is quickly moving up the priority list for IT departments across…
Disaster Recovery – Time To Create Our Plan!
Thus far, we have gone over how to classify our disasters and how to have some of those difficult conversations with our organization regarding Disaster Recovery (DR). We’ve also briefly…
Modern ITSM Practices: ITIL for Today
You can, and should, apply fundamentals of ITIL to new challenges in service. The ITIL framework will survive because it’s designed to align with the business goals of the employees…
Announcement: p99 Percentile Metrics
I’m pleased to announce that SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) offers 99th percentile metrics to help understand latency outliers in a query workload. These metrics provide visibility beyond the average…
A Case Against Chassis Switching
If you have done any work in enterprise networks, you are likely familiar with the idea of a chassis switch. They have been the de facto standard for campus and…
Network Monitoring Overload and How to Survive
It’s always good to have a periodic reminder to consider what we’re monitoring and why. Here’s an applicable article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he offers some tips…
Out Of Office: Health Check
So far in this series, we’ve covered setting expectations as well as migrating to Office 365. Now that your organization is up and running on the new platform, how do…
How To Buy Software 2018
Buying software solutions for your company is a skill just like any other business practice. To be effective at purchasing it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what…
Everything I Needed To Know About IT I Learned From Logan (Part Four)
(This is the fourth and final part of a series. You can find Part One here, Part Two here and Part Three here.) It behooves me to remind you that…