Maintenance Windows and Monitoring

I had to work last night into this morning due to work being performed on our ancient Leibert UPS that required some parts being replaced. The equipment in our data center needed to be turned off while this was occurring.

For me, I had to put together a listing of our servers and networking gear and determine the "order" of the shutdown process. It was fairly straight-forward, most of the devices sat in groups such as app servers, db servers, file and print, web..etc. And then switches, routers..etc.

Here is where I being to brag about one of our vendors, InfoSys Networks. InfoSys monitors, maintains and configures our networking gear. As part of their monitoring, they also watch our Windows servers so that we/I can be proactive at keeping everything running smoothly. Their monitoring solution, HarborNet is based on OpenSource software which they have further built upon into an excellent solution.

Back to last night. HarborNet really showed it's true value. As servers needed to be brought back online I could easily rely on HarborNet to verify that all of our servers, WAN links, and VPN connections were back up and running. There were even a few Windows services that failed to start that HarborNet quickly identified so that I could start the services.

The point I'm trying to make is that having a monitoring solution in place is critical to maintain a reliable network no matter what size. It allows you to be proactive instead of re-active so that network outages can be prevented and downtime limited. Because HarborNet is based on OpenSource, it can be customized to your liking.

InfoSys Networks also provides solutions for network architecture, network security and WAN redundancy. They are based out of Annapolis, MD.