Remote server monitoring means that the first time a customer knows that there is a problem, is when an engineer turns up to site to fix/repair it!

The demands being placed on IT staff are increasing, both from the point of view of the complexity of the systems they have to support, and the need to maintain these 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year.

All this means that when a problem does occur, the impact on the organisation can be costly and sometimes disastrous. The most significant cost to business of a server failure is the loss of revenue during a period of inactivity caused by a crash. IT functions and business processes are becoming increasingly integrated, and therefore a problem affecting one server can quickly impact heavily upon the rest of the organisation.

The challenge is to ensure your servers are kept operational, at all times, with fewer IT staff – an apparently impossible scenario!

A proactive approach to reducing downtime
Organisations of all types, both large and small and in the private or public sectors, experience similar challenges when undertaking the management of IT related projects. These include issues such as:

When many IT departments are struggling to cope with day-to-day tasks, it is easy for them to view server monitoring as an expensive luxury. But the irony is that by taking a more proactive approach to avoiding downtime in the first place, they will ultimately ease the pressure on their routine operational tasks.

Many organisations now recognise the importance of server monitoring as a critical component of managing any computer environment. The natural tendency is for them to attempt to carry out these processes in-house. While this may initially appear attractive, they soon realise that placing these additional tasks on an already over-burdened workforce can quickly lead to more problems. Ultimately this leads to the monitoring not taking place at all, with the potential for disastrous consequences.

The Gartner Group reports that organisations that perform these services internally incur almost double the costs of those using an external source. This is caused by:

• Cost of initial investment - to set up & monitor the service skills needed to monitor and react to problems.
• Logistics of centralised monitoring - a monitored server can generate a massive flow of events.
  These need to be centrally correlated into meaningful information that can pinpoint problems allowing proactive and preventive action to be taken.

Comprehensive server monitoring solution Remote Server Monitoring is free as part of network support and netcare gold packages and Lanway offer a comprehensive 24/7-365 server monitoring solution that covers the following:

• Proactive, real-time hardware health checks checking for component failure.
• Daily polling of free space of the disk drives on a server.
• Monitoring of anti-virus and security updates.
• Server memory utilisation.
• Verifying the validity of backups.
• Checking the size of SQL and Microsoft Exchange databases.
• Monitoring the Windows events logs.

Issues identified with any one of these factors will automatically trigger an alert to our service desk so that immediate action can be taken to resolve the problem.