SolarWinds Blog

Why Data Performance Monitor is Cheaper Than DIY Open-Source

12/04/14 Talk to someone who runs monitoring systems at a company with more than a few servers and you’ll quickly find out that scaling their monitoring systems is far from a minor…

Running SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor Via An HTTP Proxy

12/01/14 Many of SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor’s customers have strict policies about Internet access from and to their database servers. As a longtime consultant who wo…

How Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages Work

11/25/14 We use exponentially weighted moving averages (EWMAs) quite a bit in a few algorithms. They’re one of the tricks everyone should have in their toolbox for cheaply approxim…

Analyzing Prepared Statement Performance

11/19/14 Optimizing MySQL performance requires the ability to inspect production query traffic. If you’re not seeing your application’s production workload, you’re missing a vital …

SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor Now Supports Amazon RDS For MySQL

11/12/14 We are excited to announce that we now support monitoring Amazon RDS for MySQL. Previously we relied exclusively on deep packet inspection, but since customers can’t insta…

Inside Distributed Architectures: RT In-Flight Requests And Blockers

11/06/14 SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor’s (DPM) SaaS backend is a service-oriented architecture, which means that in addition to our external APIs that our agents and web…

Using Netlink to Optimize Socket Statistics

09/22/14 This is a story of using low-level kernel interfaces to optimize an edge case one of our agents encountered in some servers. The TL;DR version is that accessing /proc/ can…

What Privileges Does EXPLAIN Require in MySQL?

07/28/14 Here’s a simple question that I wasn’t able to solve with Google or the MySQL documentation (which is normally excellent). Perhaps it’s mentioned somewhere, but I can’t fi…

Prepared Statement Samples

07/25/14 One of our most useful features is Top Queries, which allows users to examine various metrics for families of similar queries. Once a query family is selected, we can dril…

MySQL Type Conversion Rules

07/21/14 When you send a query to MySQL, you usually don’t need to think explicitly about the types of the expressions in your query. If you compare this to a lot of programming la…

4 Things To Know About MySQL Prepared Statements

07/10/14 While writing our TCP stream reassembly and MySQL protocol reverse-engineering algorithms, a few finer points of the MySQL protocol and internals came up. None of this is …

Composition Instead of Inheritance in Go

07/01/14 Looking back, I find object-oriented programming in languages like Java and C++ to be incredibly confusing. There are so many special rules and things to know. By contrast…