IT Support

Acvtive Monitoring

Active Server Monitoring of your IT infrastructure is available as part of our Complete Server and Network Management modules or as a stand alone service to back-up your IT staff. It is designed to allow us to spot potential support issues before they become critical and cause problems for you, to identify simple performance issues or to check the need for system reconfiguration to improve reliability.

Remote monitoring is completely secure and utilises encrypted internet communications to create a secure connection between your network and our central monitoring server.

What do we monitor

We continuously monitor your network, including servers and server applications such as MICROSOFT Exchange and SQL Server. This gives us a real-time view of your server and network infrastructure, including device availability, performance data and utilisation statistics. Often we can identify and resolve issues before they become serious problems. If it is critical to your business we can monitor it and let you know when it may have a problem.

Active Server Monitoring can monitor the following and more, alerting our helpdesk or your IT staff if necessary:

  • Microsoft Exchange Server status
  • Microsoft's Active Directory
  • Internet Information Server (IIS) status
  • FTP (File Transfer Protocol) service status
  • Backup job status
  • Anti Virus software status
  • WWW service status
  • SMTP Server status
  • SQL server status
  • CPU usage
  • Network traffic
  • Memory usage
  • Page file usage
  • Disk usage
  • Microsoft Windows Event logs
  • Microsoft Windows services and process are running

By using SNMP and WMI we can monitor thousands of metrics across a whole range of network equipment, we can if required, monitor the temperature in your computer room, whether your printer is running out of paper or send you a message to order new toner for a laser printer.

How Do We Monitor

To monitor a device we simply install a small agent, or piece of software, which runs as a service on your server or PC, this then reports back to our management server via a fully encrypted secure Internet connection. If the device can't have an Agent installed such as a printer or network switch then we can use SNMP to monitor it.

Monitored elements have carefully selected parameters set and if any of their thresholds are exceeded, an alert is raised, we can then start work on diagnosing the problem or depending on the contract you have, pass the information to your IT staff to decide on the correct action to take. Alerts can be sent via Email or SMS text, which can be very helpful if it is an email problem!

Why monitor?

Monitoring allows us to prevent downtime and protect your network. As an IT support company with over 20 years experience of real life support issues we have regularly come across problems that could have been prevented by monitoring, for example the customer who thought they had been doing backups every night only to find out when they need the data that the backup job had been failing, nobody had checked the backup log file which would have told them. Or the customer who spent a great deal on having RAID 5 protection only to find when they had a disk failure the RAID set was broken, again nobody had seen the message in the event log telling them about the problem. By constantly checking your system, Active Server Monitoring can spot these kind of issues, but more importantly raise an alert when there is a problem so we can reduce potential downtime and save you money.

Performance Reporting

As well as monitoring for potential support issues a weekly or monthly scheduled report will provide you with a summary of your servers performance, showing CPU, Disk, Memory and traffic utilisation as well as service availability and incidents. This allows you to study disk usage for example and spot trends so that you can either plan some house keeping or the next disk upgrade. A sample report can be downloaded from here.