We watch your systems continuously and review the results every working day, so problems are found and dealt with before they stop your people working.
What we monitor
- Servers, PCs and firewalls: whether they are up, disk space, load, disk and RAID health, and overdue updates or restarts.
- Networks and remote access: internet connections, VPN tunnels and remote access, with a second path used to confirm a fault is real.
- Websites: that they respond from inside and outside your network, that certificates are valid, that redirects work and that security settings are in place.
- Backups: that scheduled backups ran, finished and are recent, so you can rely on them to restore.
- Security: unexpected open ports, out-of-date software, configuration changes and attacks on sign-in pages.
Daily review
Automated checks run throughout the day, including deeper website and disk-health checks. Every working day we review what they found, so slow-moving problems, such as a disk filling over weeks, are caught before they become an outage.
An alert from the monitoring system also triggers a review straight away during working hours. Monitoring is provided during working hours; out-of-hours response is not part of the service.
Triage
We sort every alert before we act on it:
- Real fault, false alarm or planned work. Planned maintenance is scheduled in, so it does not raise alarms.
- How urgent it is. Hardware failures, such as a failing disk or a degraded RAID array, are always raised straight away.
- Repeat false alarms. We fix the check, so the alerts that remain mean something.
- Decisions that are yours. We record the issue, agree the next step with you and keep it visible until it is closed.
When something serious happens
When a serious weakness is announced in software your systems run, such as a critical PHP release, we check which of your servers are affected and put temporary protection in place. We patch as soon as a fixed version is available and tested, and keep reviewing the temporary protection until it is no longer needed.
We also watch for password-guessing attacks on website sign-in pages, measure how many are refused, and tighten protection where needed.
Reporting
After a significant incident we send you a written report that says what happened, what we did and what we recommend.