Latest SRE & DevOps Articles

Six Ways to Protect your Database Backups

06/15/18 I often see forum posts from accidental administrators who want to know how to recover data without a backup. The short answer is, “Now is a good time to work on your resu…

Syslog – The Blue-collar Worker of the Data Center

06/15/18 Striking a balance between good visibility into infrastructure events and too much noise is difficult. I’ve worked in plenty of enterprise environments where multiple tool…

New integrations for Azure monitoring

This article details how to monitor Azure Container Apps using Datadog, providing full visibility into your microservices. It outlines setting up Datadog's Azure integration to aut…

Federal IT Management 10 Years from Now: New Skills Required

06/14/18 Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he discusses what we can expect to see in the future as federal IT professionals. Over the past couple o…

SNMP – It’s Not a Trap!

06/14/18 The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been a key part of managing network devices in the data center for some time. It really is a pretty simple protocol to wo…

Software Updates in the IT Stack: (Not) a Game of Jenga

06/14/18 In my last post, I talked about upgrading storage systems. More specifically, how to determine the right upgrade interval for your storage systems. What the previous post …

A New Approach to Cloud-Native Applications and How They Could and Should Replace the Legacy Ones

06/14/18 “In the beginning was the word” … oops, “the cloud.” Long ago “cloud” was a buzzword, especially when it was a cool word that one knew exactly what it meant. Many companie…

Who Protects the Protectors?

06/14/18 Remember the person in my last post who asked me to describe a load balancer? They came back and asked about ASAs. I’m not sure if they really wanted to know, or if they j…

7 Ways IT Data Powers the Service Desk

06/14/18 Data is only valuable if you use it to solve a problem. Look no further than the IT service desk for a number of possibilities. Here are seven IT service desk functions th…

Monitor Oracle Database with Datadog

ITUnified's Datadog Marketplace offering helps optimize Oracle database performance by providing proactive monitoring and automated tuning. It identifies and resolves performance b…

Be Responsive and Responsible

06/13/18 Over the years, I’ve read more than a few articles about the qualities that are found in the best administrators. These articles focus on soft skills, but sometimes will l…

Paving the Road to Your Storage System

06/13/18 A storage system on its own is not useful. Sure, it can store data, but how are you going to put any data on it? Or read back the data that you just stored? You need to co…