It’s such a great word, we like to know our home security is monitored, or our health is monitored, or what our children (young as they might be) are viewing on the internet is monitored. It follows that we like our IT systems being monitored, but what should we be expecting? For us, it comes under two headings, automatic and manual.

They both check various aspects of the IT infrastructure, and would include, internet connectivity, server roles running as expected (DNS, DHCP, Printing), backup tasks, equipment load, anticipated failures, the list continues. Some items are best checked manually, this could be due to them not being able to be automated, or they require human intuition to identify clearly what the true results are. It is best to schedule these types of checks on a monthly basis. You will hear in the next few weeks from your account manager regarding this, if you have not already.

Primarily we monitor automatically, this has the advantage of being silent, running 24×7, and only asking for attention when it needs it. This would be the equivalent to two or three technicians starring at logs, disk space, network activity and sending emails / SMSs when they notice a problem.

Monitoring’s two major goals are; having peace of mind that the IT is doing what it should, and knowing about hiccups before they become problems so they can be resolved before they take down your services. In many cases, those hiccups are resolved automatically by the monitoring service, which has the added benefit of reducing ongoing support costs.

We now have service offerings that include automatic monitoring, so if you have any questions about how monitoring applies to you, or how it can reduce your ongoing support costs, please contact us at The IT Department.