As a business you watch your sales figures, you check staff performance and monitor working hours and maybe you have Key Performance Indicators. All these things help you measure how well your company is currently doing, how it could be handled better or help identify how things may go wrong and how you could stop them for the future. All these things are essential to a business, however supporting the foundations of business are IT networks.

When your IT systems ‘fail’ your staff cannot work, your sales will suffer and any amount of downtime is lost money. Your IT should be monitored constantly and if not it should be monitored at least daily. Your network and your workstations actually carry out many more functions than you see as an end-user.

Your network should be checked on a constant/daily basis including the following checks:

• Check that your server is up and running
• Check that you can connect to the internet
• Check vital components of your server’s operating system
• Ping¹ various network devices or remote offices that you need to do your work
• Check TCP² ports on your network, on other networks or at your ISP³
• Check disk space to ensure it’s below a set threshold
• Check RAID⁴ devices to ensure that all disks are functioning correctly and data is safe
• Check your website to ensure it’s up and running and serving your customers
• Check other devices using SNMP⁵

Your workstations also have background commands running, that most of the time you are not aware of and to make sure your workstation is ready to use when you need it the following should be checked constantly/daily:

• Checks that your antivirus is right up-to-date
• Check that your Windows^® Services are operating properly
• Looks for unauthorized log in attempts
• Checks to ensure you have adequate disk space remaining
• Check that your disks are healthy and there are no integrity issues
• Reviews Critical Event log entries and spots other issues

All these checks sound good but what do they prevent from happening and how do they help your business?

Well the short answer to that is ...when all these items have passed their checks quite simply your systems work. They work when you need them and if there is anything that needs attention or fixing it can be done before it causes downtime.

More specifically - Checking your server makes sure that you have full access to e-mails, shared documents, internet and more. Checking your OS system makes sure that you can logon to your network, access the internet and print work. To Ping various devices ensures all your networkable devices are communicating correctly so your remote users can work. Disk space and RAID are checked to ensure that all disks are working properly and there is enough space to save your work, running out of disk space can cause your computer to crash and involves lengthy delays to repair the device. The most important benefit of all these checks is peace of mind. Knowing you don’t have to worry about if your systems fail or when that might happen.

So this is all well and good but when does your IT department have time to run all these checks on all systems and workstations. I would hope that they don’t, it would take hours of manual checking. Basic checks can be done easily but for all these comprehensive checks that are the foundations of your IT you should have something more automated. CCS can offer this service and for this month you can get your first month free, in addition to this great offer you will get reports that show you what has been checked and the results on a daily basis.

Another great way to decipher the tech language is to click here for a full IT dictionary.

1. Ping – This is the action of contacting an IP address to make sure it is connected and working by sending an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and then getting a reply.
2. TCP - Transmission Control Protocol. TCP is responsible for ensuring that data sent over the internet is divided into packets and for reassembling the packets back into the complete message at the other end. The packets that IP (Internet Protocol) deliver and manage.
3. ISP – Internet service provider, for example sky, BT, Tiscalli ect.
4. RAID - Redundant array of independent disks. A way of storing the same data in different places by placing data on multiple disks you can improve performance.
5. SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the protocol governing network management and the monitoring of network devices and their functions