What does an IT support team do? – Part 2: IT Monitoring

In our last post, we introduced you to the array of different things an IT support team does in the line of duty. Now it’s time to shine the spotlight on one particularly important area of our work: IT monitoring.

Not long ago, we wrote about the fact the recent Facebook and WhatsApp outage proved that it’s not possible to achieve 100% uptime. With no budget in the world big enough to keep everything up and running smoothly without fail, it falls to – you guessed it – your trusty IT support team to proactively monitor your IT systems ready to act quickly if there’s a problem.

IT monitoring can massively reduce the chances of something going wrong with your IT systems, allowing us to spot and deal with system and network issues before they escalate. But what is it, and what kind of things are we looking out for?

IT monitoring checklist

IT monitoring is a continual process that involves measuring the performance of your IT systems to check they’re running the way they should be. By doing this monitoring in real time, IT support teams like ours can develop working solutions to keep your business online. Specifically, we’ll be keeping an eye on your:

• Server – we’ll be monitoring various technical-sounding things like disk and memory usage, CPU performance, network throughput, uptime alerts, and any other performance-related features.
• Network – again, it’s pretty technical – we’ll be reviewing peaks and trends in network switch utilisation, individual network interface utilisation and system uptime. That, and the temperature and humidity of your server room!
• Cyber Security – we’ll look out for potential threats (like cyber-attacks) and your vulnerability to them, installing security updates, patches and preventions to keep you as protected as you can be.
• Updates – from software to server and all the security patches in between, we’ll monitor available updates and keep you up to date without causing (too much) disruption to your business.
• Equipment – it’s not just virtual systems that need monitoring – your IT equipment does, too. By monitoring the capacity and performance of your hardware, we’ll be able to spot if there’s a problem that could lead to failures and fix it before it becomes a business issue. That’s particularly important for the equipment that tends to be hidden away – like servers – as their flashing warning lights are out of sight and out of mind.

The upshot of all this is that we’ll make sure you’re aware of any critical network events before they start impacting your business and its bottom line, whether your IT systems are on-premises or cloud-based. While we’re at it, we might well spot ways you could be optimising how your IT systems are run, so we’ll be sure to make suggestions if we think it could save you time and money and make your business more secure.

If you’d like to enlist us for 24/7, 365-days-a-year proactive IT monitoring, it’s included with all our IT Helpdesk services and gives you the peace of mind that there’s someone looking out for your business IT systems, round the clock. Give us a call on 01509 80 85 86 or email us on [email protected] and let’s talk about your specific business needs.

Posted on: 29th November 2021.