If you’re an IT admin responsible for managing your organization’s critical assets in an enterprise network, Active Directory (AD) should be your number one tool. Whether you’re running a small network or a large one, managing a slew of assets, users, and permissions can be a tedious ordeal. AD facilitates and streamlines this process. A … Read more Active Directory Forest and Domain Guide + Best Tools
Virtualization can be useful everywhere, whether for home office and small business use, or in large enterprises and data centers. Using appropriate software to manage those virtualizations is important—if you aren’t using the right tools, your virtual environment can be messy and ineffective at best, or buggy and non-functional at worst. In this guide, I’ll … Read more Best Virtualization Software Comparison
A database management system, also called DBMS, is a program that allows admins to access, alter, and analyze a database. In this article, I’ll describe the functions of a database management system and review different types of databases. While this isn’t a comprehensive list of all DBMS types, it’s a start if you’re looking for … Read more What to Know Before Choosing a Database Management System
In server and application monitoring, response time is one of the most critical attributes to track because it tends to have the biggest effect on end users. If a server response time is slow, then so are the applications or websites, regardless of how well-tuned your other resources are. It’s important to use ongoing server … Read more How to Check, Measure, and Improve Server and Application Response Time With Monitoring Tools
Virtualization technology is rapidly spreading, with many enterprises having infrastructure heavily comprised of virtual machines, servers, and storage. These kinds of virtualization are created with technology called a “virtual machine manager” or a “hypervisor,” and this technology can (and should) be monitored and managed with other software. Using monitoring software like SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager or … Read more What Is a Virtual Machine Manager Software for Administrators?
When you make a credit card transaction, the last thing you want to think about is your data getting stolen. Fortunately, credit card companies put several measures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen. For businesses dealing with customer payments, PCI DSS compliance measures are a simple and necessary step in making sure customer … Read more Ultimate Guide to PCI DSS Compliance Requirements
The advent of virtualization technology revolutionized the way hardware could be used in many different businesses. Virtualization of applications and desktops has allowed easier access to users and employees, making remote work increasingly possible, and the virtualization of networks, storage, and servers improved efficiency and performance metrics for organizations in need of powerful and reliable … Read more Virtualization Technology vs. Cloud Virtualization
If you’re an admin, you’re likely already familiar with SolarWinds and its array of highly rated products suited for just about every aspect of IT management. But you might not be familiar with SolarWinds® Access Rights Manager (ARM). This software exists because it’s critical for you to manage and audit access rights across the system—the … Read more SolarWinds Access Rights Manager Review
As monitoring aficionados, our toolbox sports an embarrassment of riches, from configuration management to logging, and from synthetic transaction solutions to application tracing and monitoring. It could be argued that cloud-based application monitoring (or APM) tools are the most plentiful and, to a certain community of IT practitioners, the most essential, providing crucial information to … Read more Best Application Monitoring Tools
Companies depend on their server infrastructure for most IT functions, including data storage, hosting websites, emails, and applications. While many businesses have shifted to cloud services using servers located in enormous, distant data centers, a significant number of organizations still have in-house servers or use a hybrid environment of in-house and cloud services to host … Read more What Is Server Management? Definition, Best Practices, and Best Software