What Remote Monitoring checks does Superfast IT carry out on Clients’ Systems?

For our customers who are covered by a managed services agreement, we have hundreds of monitors in place which we use to alert us when something goes wrong.

A team of people watches out for these alerts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, notifying our technical support team (sometimes getting us out of bed in the early hours) when corrective action is required.

Here’s the list of monitor categories included in our remote system monitoring, with the number of individual monitors in brackets:

• Active Directory (136)
• Antivirus (212)
• Backup (47)
• Citrix (80)
• DHCP (27)
• Exchange (396)
• Hardware (736)
• Hyper-V (42)
• IIS (26)
• Patch Management (11)
• Performance (9)
• Security (10)
• Sharepoint (163)
• SQL Server (36)
• Terminal Server / Remote Desktop Services (37)
• VMware (76)
• Volume Shadow Copy (7)
• Windows Server (129)

Examples of Monitors

Below, you can see a selection of monitors from three of the above categories:

Hardware Monitoring

• Server – A power supply in the enclosure has an AC failure
• Server – Physical disk is offline
• Server – Temperature exceeded the maximum warning threshold
• RAID – Out of date firmware
• Disk – Predicted failure

Performance Monitoring

• Average processor utilisation is above 85%
• Available memory is very low
• Current disk queue length is high

Windows Server Server Monitoring

• DNS server not in running state
• Duplicate IP address has been detected
• Event log is full
• Windows Server licensing issue
• Print Spooler not in running state
• Unexpected restart with memory dump

Any of these alerts could highlight an issue of which users may not be immediately aware of. Using the alerts, we can take corrective action quickly, often managing to resolve the issue before it has an adverse impact on the client.

Backup Monitoring

Backup monitoring deserves a special mention because it is so critically important to us. In this area, we have two completely separate monitoring systems to provide a belt-and-braces approach, giving greater assurance that nothing gets missed.

As well as monitoring the success of backup jobs, the second system monitors the offsite replication of backup data, verification of backup images, backup software licence status, and also notifies if there is inactivity.

To provide customers with additional peace of mind, we can also configure our backup solution to send them email notifications of backup success/failure, adding a third control.

Custom Monitoring

The above covers regular system monitoring that we have in place, but what about if you have a particular business application?

Well, we can set up bespoke monitors tailored to your individual requirements.

For example, we can configure monitors to keep an eye on Windows services, processes, network ports, network device availability and more. Pretty much anything you can think of; we can probably monitor it.

Is there anything else you’d like to know about how we remotely monitor clients’ systems? Let us know if the comments below.

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