Why to implement a remote server monitoring system

Remote server monitoring solutions are well known by most It engineers, but some in house techies or IT managers many not be ware of a service that will help you improve your network stability and increase productivity.} We have been using a Network monitoring system in our office for 6 months now and I can tell you that from my experiences so far, it's been a god send.
So how does it work?
A remote server monitoring system essential looks at your server(s) and alerts you of any problems that occur, either via email or sms or both. This can be anything from temperature problems, chassis intrusion, RAID array failures, ECC memory faults etc
The tool or service will poll the Server(s) or network devices for responses, failures etc - each service and tool is different some will use agents on the monitored devices others will use inbuilt technologies such as WMI for Windows or SNMP for Cisco routers.
What's monitored?
Pretty much all monitoring tools these days can monitor a wide variety of network devices, operating systems and hardware devices.
Anti-Virus, Backup and Security
The minimum that should be checked at least once per day are:
o Anti-Virus Software, is it up to date? Is the Service running?
o Backups - Have they completed successfully? Is the media still good? If tape backup still being used are the heads due to be cleaned?
o Security Patches - Are all machines on the network running up to date patches?
o Hacking.
o Is the firewall working correctly?
Monitoring Hardware - this should be done 24x7
All business critical hardware should be monitored 24 hours a day 7 days a week, with mission critical issues alerting the CIO or IT Manager immediately. CPU, Memory, RAID, Fans, Hard disk are all things that should be continuously monitored.
Network performance monitoring.
Hard Disk storage used and remaining will be monitored, user/system folder/file size, percentage of storage growth, whether any services that should be running have stopped, exchange store size and health, disk performance, memory performance.
The remote server monitoring system we use also keeps us informed of any problems we may have with software applications on the server, for example if an application becomes inaccessible then we will be alerted to the fact.
How does the system keep us informed if there are any problems?
The system has a customer dashboard accessible from the Internet or any WAP enabled phone. Alerts can be sent as mentioned either to email or phone by way of SMS. Also daily, weekly and monthly reports are generated and email to the specified recipients.
For a remote server monitoring service go here.
Other sites worth checking out...
Business critical reasons to implement a remote server monitoring system
Reasons to implement a remote server monitoring system
Reasons to implement a remote server monitoring system