Do you regularly clean up your Active Directory® (AD)? Have you set a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule, or do you wait until you receive a change request? If you neglect AD cleanup and maintenance, your environment will get cluttered and increasingly difficult to navigate. Accounts become inactive for a variety of reasons, such as … Read more Centralized Active Directory Management and Clean-Up
<Syslog_output> <server> 192.168.1.1</server> </syslog_output> Many people are familiar with the above commands, which are used for forwarding syslog to the syslog server (192.168.1.1). However, do you know how syslog can be helpful? Read on to find out how and see some different use cases for enabling syslog in your infrastructure. The primary use of … Read more Is Syslog Useful?
The network as we know it is being redefined. As more endpoints, applications, and devices are added to the mix, the network is transforming. For IT, the challenge is two-fold: stay on top of the network today, and prepare for what it could look like tomorrow. In an environment where workers expect to be online … Read more How to Tame and Redefine Your Network Now
With the added complexity of growing data volumes and ever changing workloads, database performance tuning is now necessary to maximize resource utilizations and system performance. However, performance tuning is often easier said than done. Let’s face it, tuning is difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, it requires a significant amount of expertise … Read more Maximizing Database Performance – MySQL Tuning Best Practices
Be it SQL Server or the improved version of SQL Server on the cloud called as SQL Azure, when it comes to monitoring, there is nothing as powerful as DMVs (Dynamic Management Views). For a primer, Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a set of virtual views which expose the internal states of SQL Server deployment. … Read more How SQL Server DMVs Can Be a Savior in SQL Azure, Too
These days, even business-critical applications are being virtualized, and with the increasing costs and complexity of data environments, it’s not surprising. Some estimate that large organizations are as much as 70% virtualized already, with no plans to go back to physical servers. Virtualization, however, introduces new challenges for the Oracle DBA, including getting visibility to … Read more Must-know Tips and Tools for Oracle Virtualization
Test Driven Development (TDD) is not only a discipline we like to write about, we practice it ourselves every day. This is a blog post we shared with our friends over at Rainforest QA. Because we know you can’t enough of a good thing, we’re re-posting it here. Enjoy! Librato is a prolific engineering shop. … Read more TDD: A Blueprint for Choosing Metrics
Imagine for a moment that you have suddenly been promoted from regular old developer to senior architect, and tasked with overseeing the telemetry efforts for all of the engineering teams at your organization. I recently had a conversation at DevOps Days Toronto with someone who was living through exactly that experience. He’d just been put in … Read more Choosing Metrics that Matter (Beyond CPU/Disk/Network)
Virtualization management requires mastering a specific set of skills. But once mastered, these essential skills can lead to a long and meaningful career in IT. IT pros need a foundation in technologies. To extend utility to their organizations, they should further develop three essential skills – monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting. Think back to your first responsibilities as an … Read more Virtualization Monitoring Management Guide
The world may run on coffee, but it’s the alarm clock that gets us out of bed. It operates on a simple threshold. You set the time that’s important to you and receive an alert when that variable is true. Like your alarm clock, today’s tooling for web service alerting often operates on simple thresholds, … Read more No Need to Be Alarmed: Crafting an Effective Alert Strategy