Network Monitoring

2DE offers several levels of monitoring services (see links below for offering descriptions).

Monitoring is a form of preventative maintenance. It is a hard cost to swallow but depending on your business and the effects an unscheduled outage has to your operation, monitoring services can save a considerable amount of money. These savings come in several forms such as actual hard dollars spent on emergency repairs and lost on loss of revenue as well as soft dollars lost in customer loyalty and your employee productivity.

No one monitoring solution is appropriate for all situations; therefore, 2DE recommends using a mix of monitoring services. An example: basic monitoring for desktops, intermediate monitoring for general servers and core LAN / WAN hardware, and advanced monitoring for mission critical components such as a server running your customer database. Of course your mix and needs may be different.

Why would you want monitoring services? I/T staff is expensive and most businesses keep these people busy installing and maintaining, they have little time left to perform detailed or routine monitoring.

How can you tell if you need monitoring services? Just take a look at your network downtime, does it feel a little too frequent? Do you keep getting requests from your staff that you need more of this or that and they need it yesterday?

Having a hard time managing your I/T budget? Does it seem to cost more than you think it should?

If you are finding you are answering yes to any of these questions then our monitoring services may be of benefit to your business.

The most basic level of monitoring is that provided by the technician when he or she is onsite. This type of monitoring is cursory at best and has no additional charges associated with it other than the time it actually takes to perform. Because of this, not every log file is checked on each visit. It is possible with this basic level of monitoring that developing errors could be missed.

The next level of monitoring is a recurring check of pertinent server and application log files. This type of monitoring generally would locate developing issues such as a hard drive logging errors prior to becoming completely defective, or a server becoming low on memory or disk space. The effectiveness of this type of monitoring depends on its frequency. 2DE generally recommends reviewing pertinent log files weekly. Pricing for this level of service is based on number of servers and applications and frequency of review.

This is the highest level of monitoring offered. The difference at this level is that automated tools are used in place of a person to increase the frequency and granularity of monitoring. Additional capabilities such as real-time alerting of failures or negatives trends become possible. Historical data is collected to produce graphs and other documentation that can be used to deduce trends and plan in advance for large expenses. This level of monitoring is recommended for businesses where the hardware or application is mission critical. While no level of monitoring can guarantee that each and every error of a system or network will be captured or an outage will be prevented, it provides a very significant opportunity over other types of monitoring to minimize the impact of failures to your business. Pricing is dependent on the number and types of items to be monitored as well as the tools necessary to accomplish the given tasks.