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Microsoft Names SolarWinds Head Geek MVP

Microsoft has named SolarWinds Head Geek Lawrence Garvin a 2013 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for the ninth consecutive year, for his exceptional technical community leadership and for actively sharing his high-quality, real-world expertise with others.

Each year, Microsoft selects around 4,000 MVPs from over 100 million social and technical Microsoft community members, rigorously evaluating them on technical expertise, community leadership and voluntary community contributions. Microsoft MVPs come from more than 90 countries, speak over 40 different languages, and are awarded in more than 90 Microsoft technologies. Together, they answer more than 10 million questions each year.

Garvin earned his first Microsoft MVP Award in 2005 and has received one each consecutive year for his continued contributions to and enthusiasm for the Microsoft community. Garvin is one of only 28 professionals worldwide named as a Microsoft MVP in the Software Packaging, Deployment & Servicing category, which now comprises all of the products, tools, and processes related in any way to distributing software.

Garvin is active in the Microsoft TechNet WSUS forum, moderating and contributing thousands of posts annually. He also recently joined an advisory committee with other MVPs to provide insight to the Microsoft Forums development teams.

“Lawrence has over 25 years’ experience in IT and he constantly stays up to date on technical trends and challenges – he really knows his stuff. What’s more is Lawrence is incredibly generous in sharing that knowledge as a Microsoft MVP and a Head Geek,” said Patrick Hubbard, fellow Head Geek at SolarWinds. “We’re proud to count Lawrence as a SolarWinds Head Geek because he genuinely connects with IT pros and helps them solve their problems.”

Related Links:

www.solarwinds.com

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Microsoft Names SolarWinds Head Geek MVP

Microsoft has named SolarWinds Head Geek Lawrence Garvin a 2013 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for the ninth consecutive year, for his exceptional technical community leadership and for actively sharing his high-quality, real-world expertise with others.

Each year, Microsoft selects around 4,000 MVPs from over 100 million social and technical Microsoft community members, rigorously evaluating them on technical expertise, community leadership and voluntary community contributions. Microsoft MVPs come from more than 90 countries, speak over 40 different languages, and are awarded in more than 90 Microsoft technologies. Together, they answer more than 10 million questions each year.

Garvin earned his first Microsoft MVP Award in 2005 and has received one each consecutive year for his continued contributions to and enthusiasm for the Microsoft community. Garvin is one of only 28 professionals worldwide named as a Microsoft MVP in the Software Packaging, Deployment & Servicing category, which now comprises all of the products, tools, and processes related in any way to distributing software.

Garvin is active in the Microsoft TechNet WSUS forum, moderating and contributing thousands of posts annually. He also recently joined an advisory committee with other MVPs to provide insight to the Microsoft Forums development teams.

“Lawrence has over 25 years’ experience in IT and he constantly stays up to date on technical trends and challenges – he really knows his stuff. What’s more is Lawrence is incredibly generous in sharing that knowledge as a Microsoft MVP and a Head Geek,” said Patrick Hubbard, fellow Head Geek at SolarWinds. “We’re proud to count Lawrence as a SolarWinds Head Geek because he genuinely connects with IT pros and helps them solve their problems.”

Related Links:

www.solarwinds.com

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...