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SolarWinds Launches "Big Hairy Sweepstakes"

SolarWinds launched the "Big Hairy Sweepstakes," a Facebook-based contest in which IT pros vote on four short videos of the most obnoxious help desk stories for a chance to win an enormous beastly wall cling to guard the help desk from more ridiculous queries.

From April 17 to May 3, IT pros can log on to the Facebook contest page and cast their votes for one of four detestable characters that bother their IT help desk manager with zany issues.

Choose from:

- The Know-It-All - Have you ever had a user think he knows more than you? The nerve!

- The Paranoid User - Everyone is out to get this guy and only you can stop them!

- The Horror Story - We're sure you've seen some disgusting things on the job...

- The Boss' Son - When you have to stop everything important and deal with this guy.

Brought to you from the geeky minds of SolarWinds, this contest chronicles characters that seemingly every IT help desk has had to deal with at one time or another. As quirky as some of the end-users above are, all are inspired by actual help desk tickets.

Sweepstakes voters will be entered to win one of eight monstrous, wild-eyed wall clings and will be announced on the SolarWinds Facebook page May 6. Participants must be legal residents of the United States to be entered to win in this sweepstakes.

Related Links:

Find out more about the Big Hairy Sweepstakes

Image removed.

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SolarWinds Launches "Big Hairy Sweepstakes"

SolarWinds launched the "Big Hairy Sweepstakes," a Facebook-based contest in which IT pros vote on four short videos of the most obnoxious help desk stories for a chance to win an enormous beastly wall cling to guard the help desk from more ridiculous queries.

From April 17 to May 3, IT pros can log on to the Facebook contest page and cast their votes for one of four detestable characters that bother their IT help desk manager with zany issues.

Choose from:

- The Know-It-All - Have you ever had a user think he knows more than you? The nerve!

- The Paranoid User - Everyone is out to get this guy and only you can stop them!

- The Horror Story - We're sure you've seen some disgusting things on the job...

- The Boss' Son - When you have to stop everything important and deal with this guy.

Brought to you from the geeky minds of SolarWinds, this contest chronicles characters that seemingly every IT help desk has had to deal with at one time or another. As quirky as some of the end-users above are, all are inspired by actual help desk tickets.

Sweepstakes voters will be entered to win one of eight monstrous, wild-eyed wall clings and will be announced on the SolarWinds Facebook page May 6. Participants must be legal residents of the United States to be entered to win in this sweepstakes.

Related Links:

Find out more about the Big Hairy Sweepstakes

Image removed.

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...