What would happen if your server went down today? Apart from the panic and flurry of activity to get things back online, a good number of employees would be twiddling their thumbs and your boss would be wondering how much this is going to cost the company. And wouldn’t it be even more embarrassing if the server crashed because you ran out of disk space or another issue that could have been easily avoided with proper monitoring?
As the saying goes, prevention is far better than cure and a similar situation to the above can be avoided by using a network monitoring service to check on your server status and spot potential issues, before they turn into critical problems. We look at three key benefits of using this solution – to avoid hearing those dreaded words: “server down”.
1. A proactive approach to problem solving
Checking every single device on your network to ensure they are all working perfectly is a Herculean task. Remote workstations, multiple configurations, varying peak load times can make an IT administrator’s job go from difficult to near impossible. As a result, many system administrators simply respond to critical events as and when they occur.
However, by using technology to monitor server status, you will be able to spot potential problems before they happen. Items such as antivirus updates, scheduled backups, Windows® services disruptions and physical disk performance can all be monitored by the software, alerting you when something is not right.
In fact, pre-configured checks can be run continuously, allowing you to immediately see potential issues and remedy them before they become critical. In this way, your server stays healthy and you are not bombarded by user support calls that take time to fix.
2. Increased security due to configurable alerting
When you monitor server status, a good solution should enable you to set customized alerts for specific events, so that you can be instantly notified if a server or workstation is no longer performing as it should. That allows you to investigate and rectify potential problems, to ensure the smooth running of your IT operation.
In addition, by having your antivirus updates and backups continually monitored and checked, you also ensure that your system has the latest patches and updates in place, as well as recent backups in the event something goes horribly wrong.
3. It saves money to provide you with a fast ROI
As IT budgets are being squeezed tighter, departments are under more pressure to do more with less. By using software to monitor server status you essentially add the resources of additional IT personnel to your resources at a tiny fraction of the cost. Given the array of tasks that good monitoring services can perform, ROI can actually be as quick as within six days.
In addition, because you are able to redeploy skilled personnel into development and training areas your organization could save even more money.
If you never seem to have the time to go through your daily IT checklist, you should seriously considering checking the health and performance of your servers and workstations using network monitoring service. Given the fast ROI, increased efficiency and time saved, it really shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.
originally posted by Jesmond Darmanin on August 24, 2012