SolarWinds Blog

A tutorial on how to use Go’s database/sql package

07/22/13 We found ourselves wishing for a tutorial to complement the database/sql documentation in Go, so we wrote one and shared it on Github. Please send pull requests to contrib…

Streaming Approximate Histograms in Go

07/08/13 If you’re looking at response time, what’s more useful: a mean or a percentile? Not sure? You probably know how to calculate the average or mean of a sample, but what abou…

4 Statistical Process Control Rules That Detect Anomalies in Systems

06/26/13 Statistical Process Control (SPC), or using numbers or data to study the characteristics of our process to make it behave the way we want it to behave, has been around sin…

Quantifying Abnormal Behavior

06/25/13 At Velocity last week, I spoke about how we quantify abnormality in a system’s time-series metrics cheaply, in realtime, at high frequency. Note that this is not the same …

Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go

06/04/13 Not too long ago, my primary programming language was Perl. I’ve written a lot of Perl, including some things that I think are quite clever. And therein lies the problem. …

How Does Adaptive Fault Detection Work? Does It Eliminate Thresholds?

04/17/13 In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that we’ve developed th…

Using Socat to Simulate Networking Traffic to Test and Debug

04/15/13 If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data betwee…

Two Reasons Why Threshold-Based Monitoring Is Hopelessly Broken

04/10/13 Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a …

A Sure-Fire Recipe For Monitoring Disaster

04/09/13 In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyon…

Why You Should Almost Never Alert On Thresholds

04/08/13 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vi…

SQL Server Consolidation, Part 3

12/20/12 I wrote a couple of posts previously on SQL Server consolidation. The first post tried to give insight on some of the problems and associated motivating factors that most …

SQL Server Consolidation, Part 2

12/20/12 Consider for a moment that you have a deck attached to your house. It is one story above ground level and is growing weaker with each passing year. The former homeowner pa…