“How much load can this system sustain?” is a common question in capacity planning. The practical purpose is usually something like the following: How soon will the system begin to…
Capacity Planning with the Universal Scalability Law
When Should You NOT Virtualize That System?
Virtualization is an amazing and valuable tool for so many reasons. I’ve been a proponent of the concept since GSX server, and early Workstation products. In the early days, I…
Introducing Query Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection sure is a hot topic. We’ve written about it ourselves a number of times, and Preetam Jinka and I just co authored a book for O’Reilly called Anomaly…
The Five Commandments of Tomorrow’s Network
Recently, I’ve been giving some thought to the roadblocks I discover when I attempt network automation and orchestration, and how those roadblocks affect the software-defined data center idea as a whole. As a result,…
Nobody Loves Graphite Anymore
Many of our customers use Graphite, and I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say it’s probably the most commonly used time series database in the DevOps…
Operations vs. Engineering Tools
Whether your IT operation is a small-scale endeavor or a web-scale enterprise, systems monitoring plays a critical role in the delivery of your services. The ability to quickly and accurately…
Hybrid IT
These past few years you’ve heard a lot about the cloud. The cloud that’s always been there has a new approach for companies. Run your applications directly from the cloud…
Troubleshooting SQL Server, Part 2 : Inside or outside? Error or Not?
In the popular white paper entitled Troubleshooting SQL Server Wait Statistics, I take you through three scenarios in which a wait stats-only approach is insufficient or even harmful to detecting, diagnosing,…
Great Advice on Monitoring Amazon RDS For MySQL From Datadog
Our friends at Datadog just published an insanely great three part series on monitoring Amazon RDS for MySQL using Datadog. You should go read that now.
Windows Guest Licensing: To KMS or Not?
To better combat software piracy, Microsoft introduced License Activation with Windows XP/Server 2003; however, activation was pretty much implied and automatic if you had volume license keys. When these keys,…