Friday ended just like any other with the system admin making one last sweep through the data center to ensure all is well prior to his three day weekend – taking Monday off. The servers were serving, the switches were switching and all was right with the world…..until the switch supporting the DNS servers, domain controllers and Exchange servers went down. It was late Friday night when this happened and no one knew about it. The weekend passed and since the switch was down the network backups failed. Since the Exchange servers were down, communication between the company and the outside world was cut off and the network is down.

Monday rolls around and the system admin is off and out of town. Business is at a stand still and the Director of IT is frantically trying to get in touch with the system admin but she comes up short as he is out of town with his cell phone off. Monday is shot and the management staff is pointing fingers. This is an all too common occurrence but disasters like this can be detected and prevented with the proper tools in place.

The key to early detection and prevention is an active network monitoring system that keeps tabs on all vital network systems, services and processes and reports changes that could affect business productivity. Vital network systems, services and processes include servers, applications, switches, SAN’s, UPS’s, facility power and related equipment that comprise your infrastructure. Anything attached to the network that your business depends on should be monitored to ensure it does not fail. In today’s fast paced environments down time directly results in lost productivity and revenue.

If your business has experienced a similar outage or you want to prevent one, it is time to evaluate your options and implement a network monitoring solution. The monitoring solution is placed inside your network and monitors all vital statistics of each network device – including servers, drive capacity, processes, temperature, power, throughput and hundreds of other factors. If an acceptable threshold is detected, the system administrators are sent an e-mail or SMS message if the messaging system is down.

This is cheap insurance to ensure your vital business infrastructure performs properly. We would love to talk with you, evaluate your environment and provide the right monitoring solution for you. Please feel free to contact us anytime for your free evaluation.