All Posts

A lot of monitoring systems have a goal of end-to-end tracing, from “click to disk” or something similar. This is usually implemented by adding some kind of tracing information to…

Monitoring is a lot of work. A monitoring system is a service unto itself, and like other applications it needs care, feeding, configuration, databases, DBAs, patching, and maintenance. Though it often prevents the loss of revenue, it doesn’t generate revenue except in rare circumstances. Last, it requires vigilance and attention to detail that is often overlooked or impossible in a busy IT environment. So why even bother?

Let’s take a look at a great real-world example that effectively illustrates how queuing theory can be unintuitive even in situations that seem simple. A recent BBC report reveals researchers’…

There’s a common misconception in the IT industry. This misconception stems from the premise that the premises of your infrastructure will either be more expensive or less expensive based on its location. Okay, that may sound like a lot of metaphorical jibber jabber and mixed-speak, but that’s how the industry talks when backed into a corner.

So you’ve started planning your career using a VCDX skillset. Continuing on that same train of thought, I want to walk you through an additional concept that might help you…

The sort buffer, which is controlled by the sort_buffer_size setting, is probably one of the most-discussed MySQL settings. Interestingly, in many cases it has a lot less potential to help…

I think we’ve all had that moment at 3:00 a.m. over the weekend when we wish our monitoring and management systems would just shut up. The UPS in rack 4’s battery life is at 40%, we GET it. But we’ve also had that moment when we tilt our head a bit looking at a monthly availability report with service gaps and can’t recall ever seeing a critical alert that telepresence went down on the executive wing.

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,…

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to speak at VMWorld in San Francisco. The session title was “Using Virtual SAN to Maximize Database Performance”, and in that session I spent time focusing on performance as well as recovery. Why would recovery be a part of the talk? Because:

Query optimization can feel like an overwhelming task. Where to start? In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to select which queries you really should optimize. This is a step…