Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Data center stories that will make you laugh or cry

Most people who have worked with IT have at one time or another in their work life come across some amazingly strange practices or major oversights that in retrospect seem more or less insane.

Here is a collection of crazy stories specifically about data centers and server rooms that we have filtered out from the gazillion of anecdotes at The Daily WTF:

Server room entrance via the women’s bathroom

When a company switched office floors but had to leave their on server room on their old floor, the solution was “simple”. Since they couldn’t walk through the offices of the new tenants in their old office, the building’s management agreed to let them seal off the server room from the old office, and build a new entrance. However, the only possible entrance then became a bit less than ideal: Through the handicapped stall in the women’s bathroom. But they did it.

Server room via bathroom

Don’t use the code lock – use your trusty Bic pen

A server room at a school had been deemed too important to be locked by a mere key. Instead they had installed a push-button code lock. There was just one flaw. On installing the push-button lock, the old key lock cylinder had simply been removed, leaving a hole in the door where you used to put the key. Someone discovered that if you put a Bic pen in the hole, you could open the lock mechanism. Presto: instant access!

Bic pen

A secure and well-ventilated location… the men’s bathroom?!?

When helping a construction site set up their computer network, a consultant instructed the project manager at the construction site to “install the server in a secure and well-ventilated location.” Apparently the definition should have been slightly more fool-proof. When the consultant arrived on site, the equipment was set up inside the men’s bathroom in a construction site trailer.

Servers in men's bathroom

The admin robot – reboot via CD-ROM eject

When an important server used for credit card transactions started crashing on a regular basis, and there was no budget in place to replace it, one tech jokingly suggested that they build a robot that could reboot the machine day and night. They ended up doing exactly that. A perfectly aligned piece of machinery ejected a CD-ROM sled exactly on the reset button of the problematic server as soon as it stopped responding to ping. (You have to wonder if MacGyver was involved…)

CD-ROM

The eco-friendly guy vs. the A/C units

When a server room filled with important server equipment was overheated during a three-day weekend, the damage was significant, with equipment replacements alone costing nearly $200,000. Once the dust settled and people started researching why the still-functioning A/C units had stopped working specifically over the weekend, an email from one of the employees turned up:

From: ----- -----------
To: IT Department
Re: A/C constantly running.

To whom it may concern,

I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working
on before our big meeting with the State ----- Commission tomorrow,
and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners
running the entire time I was here. Since it's a three day weekend,
no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7?

With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I
doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same
time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C
for the building in that room? 

I got a keycard from [the facility manager’s] desk and shut off the
A/C units. I'm sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour
or two when you come in tomorrow morning. 

In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious of our
energy usage!

Thanks,
-----

And there is more…

There are plenty of other amusing anecdotes that we couldn’t fit in since it would have made this post huge, so here are a few more, compressed:

All the above stories were found on the often very funny The Daily WTF, a website dedicated to collecting weird IT-related stories. (We can’t guarantee they’re all 100% true, though.)

We hope you found these stories as amusing as we did, and please feel free to share your own favorite anecdotes in the comments. 🙂

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free