Is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) really worth the effort? If you have been troubleshooting networks for any length of time it should be obvious that packet inspection is a technique…
DPI Training: The What and Why of Packet Analysis
Streaming Music Services and Databases
The average American consumer isn’t usually interested in “buying” a big database. But thanks to the recent boom in the popularity of subscription music services like Spotify, databases are competing…
What Is InnoDB History List Length?
Houston, we have a problem. Google search for “What is innodb history list length?” and you get a bunch of nonsense mixed in with correct information, and it’s hard to…
Introducing SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor’s New Summary Dashboard
I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a new default dashboard for SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM). Why a new dashboard? Simple: reduce the time-to-insight as far as possible. We…
Why We Love CircleCI
We are pretty much raving fans of CircleCI and we are not ashamed to say it. Here’s why. What Does CircleCI Do For Us? It would be reasonable to describe…
How to Monitor SQL Server – Best Practices Tutorial
MySQL® is one of the most popular relational database management systems being used today. Its popularity with SQL admins who manage data sets puts it at the back end of many tiered…
JMX Monitoring Best Practices
Monitoring Java management extensions (JMX) may seem daunting, but they are completely necessary for application and network management. They connect to remote clients and monitor applications running inside a Java…
4 Steps to Forecast and Plan Your Network Capacity Needs
“Monitoring” is a deceptively broad category, so it’s not surprising that IT professionals often have differing descriptions. Some believe monitoring is the thing that creates tickets in the helpdesk system.…
Server and Application Reliability
The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!” – C. Baudelaire, 1864
In IT, the hardest system issue to solve is the one you don’t know (or won’t admit) you have. I’m not saying that IT professionals willfully ignore or explain away instability. Far from it! We tend to work tirelessly to create environments that are robust, that can survive the greatest reasonable amount of perturbation, and keep delivering consistent services.
Configuring NetFlow v5 and v9 on Cisco Routers
IT pros have access to a range of tools in their monitoring toolbox. There are the humble but readily available command line options like ping, traceroute, and netstat; the versatile SNMP protocol that…