A Healthy Active Directory Makes For a Healthy Environment Do What You Can to Bolster Your Security Posture October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! In honor of the occasion, our Loop1 Technical Account Manager, Katie Boldizar, gives insight about the importance of maintaining Active Directory (AD) and how a healthy AD can significantly improve your [...]

Servers are integral to network functionality and are also one of most common targets of a cyber attack. According to Verison's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, the second most common type of security breach the world is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on servers. Servers, cloud servers, and even hybrid servers can all receive [...]

I have a really great joke about UDP, but you probably wouldn’t get it. . . Comedic gold that good can only mean one thing: IT’S SYSADMIN DAY! To celebrate, we sat down with our very own Loop1 SysAdmin, @Ben Penney, to learn a little more about him and his integral role in our company. [...]

With the ever present threat of a cyber attack it's important to maintain proper cybersecurity. Company networks are a common point of cyber attacks. Network security breaches primarily come from attacks from outside the network attempting to get in: hacking, phishing attacks, etc. But, according to the “2018 Data Breach Investigations” by Verison, network vulnerabilities [...]

The Cost of a Cyber Attack Around the world, more and more IT professionals are focusing on cybersecurity as safeguarding data is becoming increasingly more important to an organization’s internal success strategy. According to a study published by the Ponemon Institute in July of 2018, the average number of cybersecurity breaches increased by 6.4% in [...]

Is your SolarWinds Environment ready for 2019? SolarWinds recently released version upgrades for NPM, NCM, NTA, IPAM, and general updates to the Orion platform and we want to make sure your team is completely up to date. What's New? NPM 12.4 - Cisco ACI® Support. Now your team can accurately monitor your SDN environment with [...]

We live in a world these days where copy & paste is the shortest path to winning. In a world of Stack Overflow and Thwack and all those other sources of awesome content, it’s easy to find something you like, fire up a SAM template with a fresh PowerShell component and then paste the content […]

Loop1 Answers Top Questions from Alert Noise Webinar We recently hosted a webinar on alert noise – the importance of getting them under control and how to customize for your needs. If you missed it, you can view it here: We had a rich conversation in our Q&A portion where our host, Chrystal Taylor, walked […]

  When we started working with our client, he was overwhelmed. He had finally convinced his organization to invest more than $250,000 in the SolarWinds platform, but he knew he wasn’t using the tool to its full potential. Subsequently, he was losing faith in the investment. “It’s just not useful to me,” he told us. […]

Ding. Buzz. New email in inbox. Ding, Ding, DING! What’s that noise? Yes, it’s another alert, most likely one of hundreds (or more!) you could see today. On a good day, they’re a mild nuisance. On a bad day, they’re painfully distracting, forcing you to surrender your precious time to seeing if these alerts are […]

Loop1 Systems is proud to be one of the selected SolarWinds partners to provide training for the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP). The SCP was recently updated and will now be product focused, NPM and SAM, as well as being offered as the industry’s first subscription-based certification program. Earning the prestigious SCP certification indicates that a […]

Co-Owner William Fitzpatrick Buys Out Partner, Assumes 100% Ownership AUSTIN, Texas (Dec. 6, 2017) – Loop1 Systems, an IT infrastructure solutions provider and SolarWinds Authorized Partner, announced today that it has new ownership. William Fitzpatrick, who previously owned 42 percent of Loop1 Systems, now has full ownership. Fitzpatrick, taking the title of President and CEO, […]

We’ve all been there.  That same application admin has bonked his own server yet again.  Only, for some non-sensical reason it’s your fault. Yes, you the Network (or SysAdmin) guy (or girl). So, he complains to your boss who tells you to look at everything up and down the stack and waste the next hour […]

In the first post in this series I started by going over authentication with the SolarWinds API and sending queries with parameters. This time we'll dive in a little deeper and talk about leveraging the many "verbs" that are available. If you haven't already, you'll want to go and download the Orion SDK which includes [...]

One of the things that is really great about Orion is that you can be up and running in under an hour with a basic setup.  For the most part a small team doesn’t want to spend a lot of time fussing around with the monitoring tools.  Set it and forget it. I sometimes work […]

Alerting Best Practices Once you have your software installed and a few nodes added to your inventory the next stop is going to be alerting. It’s great to have a dashboard with pretty green lights, but unless the system can let you know when something’s gone awry it won’t be very useful unless you’re looking [...]

SolarWinds API, Part I This is the first post in a series I’ll be writing about using the REST API to get information out of SolarWinds (and make changes!). We’ll start with a basic query and go from there. Enter: Postman Before we write a single line of code we need to make sure that [...]

If you are taking advantage of the many helpful and powerful modules SolarWinds has to offer, it’s time to make sure you are taking steps to secure your products as well as your environment. I work with a lot of diverse clients and companies and the one thing many of them have in common is […]

In Part One of this series we looked at some of the basic terminology used in the tech world. Going forward in the series we will take a deeper dive by focusing on a specific topic. Since it seems to be common practice to prematurely blame the network for most issues and unexpected outages, I […]

I recently saw a question pop up on the SolarWinds community forum, Thwack, asking if the SolarWinds database could be virtualized. It absolutely can and I would say these days it is becoming increasingly rare for people to dedicate a physical host to their monitoring database. Despite how common it is to do, one of […]

Getting Started – Setup  Isn’t it nice when you get a new software solution and all you have to do is open it up and answer four or five questions and off you go? The problem is you are probably setting up some small widget app on your phone or a piece of software that […]

Recently, Loop1 Systems has had the opportunity to play as an active participant in the Beta program for the next gen release of the All New High Availability (HA) product for Orion. For those of you whom have struggled with designing or using past products sponsored by SolarWinds, I think you are going to be […]

Learning IP addressing was a little traumatic for me. All that math, bit boundaries, network vs. host portion of the addresses, and on and on. So when it came to learning SNMP, I wasn’t looking forward to untangling something that looked like this called an Object Identifier (OID): 1.3.6.1.4.1.2.1.13.1.1.7.6.1.8 Thankfully I learned that if I […]

Technical Jargon Decrypted – Part 1 Technology and its use of jargon can be confusing and frustrating, especially for new users (newbies). Understanding the terminology early on will help lessen these feelings and improve the overall user experience from the start. While starting from the most basic level and building a foundation, each post will […]

If you are getting ready to or if you have just purchased the Hosted SolarWinds® Web Help Desk (WHD), this would be a great time to consider taking advantage of its larger potential and scope.

So you’ve installed your SolarWinds software and it’s been happily collecting status and statistics data for weeks, months, or years. You’ve used the out-of-the-box reports, but what if you want to roll up your sleeves and get into the raw data? Plan A: Dive into the Database There are a couple of problems with this. [...]

Part 2 of the series on the basics of setting up a network monitoring system.

It is surprisingly easy to set up any monitoring system in a way that causes a flood of red and green blinking lights and hundreds of alerts each day.

For the past 3 years and 7-ish months, I have been spending my days with Loop1 customizing the full range of SolarWinds products. From NPM to DameWare to SEM and PM, I have been blessed in my career to be in a position that allows me to not only teach others this craft we call […]

For service outage notifications, proper and effective communication to the customer is crucial. If you do not already have a template in place, you can use the following guidelines to craft one today.

The most important part of your SolarWinds environment is the Database (and by extension the database server). Also, if you have a Virtual DB server we have to look at the Host.

Congratulations to Chrystal Taylor on becoming one of the newest MVP’s on the Solarwinds blog, THWACK. Read more here! Look for Chrystal on THWACK as ChrystalIT!