Query tuning is generally considered one of the fastest ways to accelerate your Microsoft SQL Server performance. System-level server performance improvement activities can be expensive and ineffective. Moreover, expert developers agree most SQL Server performance issues can be traced directly to poorly written queries and ineffective indexing rather than hardware constraints. In fact, many performance […]
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The PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) has been my bread and butter for years. As a consultant, it was the most reliable platform to develop any and all Orion® SDK scripts and tools on, as it’s almost universally installed on Windows platforms. However, a new world order is upon us, and the end of my […]
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Active directory, commonly known as AD, can be considered the heart of the IT infrastructure. It holds user account information, computers and servers, provides authentication and certificates. It even has tentacles into other application such as Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint and can provide SSO with Oracle. Polices within AD can even control remote access […]
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Now that you’ve configured monitoring and alerting for your applications, what are you going to do with the knowledge you’ve gained? Using some the data that you receive from your monitoring can help you diagnose issues and discover their root cause. When troubleshooting any issue, regardless of the application or system, you should always check […]
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Email is the lifeline for almost every business in this world. When email is down businesses cannot communicate. There is loss of productivity, which could lead to dollars lost, which in the end is obviously not good. That said, the key takeaway is that a healthy exchange environment means less issues, in turn meaning less […]
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As IT professionals, we have all been there, the dreaded help desk call “Is email down?” (Replace with any business critical application). One of the worst things we deal with in this line of work is having an outage. Outages for critical systems can impact the business in many ways. Take for example email, as […]
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If there’s a chance to save time by using scripts or automation tools, I always take it. Over the years I’ve found that there are a set of common themes associated with these scripts, and many that my colleagues and I use on a daily basis Here are some of the common categories that […]
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Contemporary monitoring solutions are no different from any other distributed application in your environment. Even a small-scale deployment can include multiple components: often, these include a Web server, an application server, and a database server. And as with any distributed application, you need to consider placement for each component. More specifically, when you are charged with designing a monitoring […]
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Custom applications play a vital role in all kinds of organizations, including education, government, healthcare, IT, and more. In order to adapt to the latest technologies, there are many changes businesses must make, especially the method they use to reach out to their customers. Most interactions between the customer/client and the organization takes place via tailor-made […]
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Hyper-converged offerings are gaining popularity, and more vendors are entering the arena. Everything is software-defined; therefore, the technology cannot be separated like in a converged offering. This can bring a new challenge when it comes to monitoring. In the case of a converged offering, you still have your separate storage, compute, network, and hypervisor. Hyper-convergence […]
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In a previous article, I wrote about the virtualization administrator’s interest in choosing between the two operating system activation methods Microsoft® offers: Multiple Activation Keys (MAK) and Key Management Service (KMS). Although there are a lot of benefits to using KMS over MAK, one of the standout reasons for selecting MAK over KMS—at least for […]
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Virtualization is an amazing and valuable tool for so many reasons. I’ve been a proponent of the concept since GSX server, and early Workstation products. In the early days, I used to use it as a fresh image to load on a workstation for a development crew who required a pristine testing environment for a […]
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