Windows Systems Monitoring
One of the services that we supply is hardware monitoring. We have a hardware monitoring system, based in the cloud, which polls and traps information to/from our customers hardware. The polling asks questions from the hardware, such as “how busy is your CPU right now” or “how much space is left on disk 2”. Traps are alerts sent out by hardware and are generally sent when hardware  is about to fail or has failed. This can be a stick of RAM or a failed disk for example.
Pretty much every device on the market has the ability to use SNMP – Simple Network Management Protocol. Cisco/HP/Netgear you name it, probably has an SNMP section where you can define where to send hardware information to.
SNMP is an industry standard monitoring protocol and is available within most pieces of hardware as an alerting mechanism. We tie your hardware to our systems and if they should fail, we know about it quickly. Our engineers are on hand to respond to these alerts and can respond based on contract.
We Offer Three Levels Of Hardware Monitoring
- Gold – 24×7 (every day) hardware monitoring – 1hr response within timeframe
- Silver – 10×7 (daytimes 8am – 6pm) hardware monitoring – 1hr response within timeframe
- Bronze – 10×5 (daytimes 8am – 6pm weekdays Mon-Fri) hardware monitoring – 1hr response within timeframe
Our pricing is a simple per month charge. This charge covers an engineer being on the end of the phone, responding to the alert within the specified time frame. Resolution to the issue is another matter entirely. Sometimes it’s as easy as just powering back on a server, other times is can be reporting to the customer that a drive has failed, but in a worse case scenario a server could have died entirely and getting that server back online will require a separate break/fix contract. This “could” be supplied by us, but most of the time we find it’s covered under the warranty bought with the hardware itself.
If you want to know more about the product we use go to http://www.castlerock.com/products/snmpc/default.php. We have 10 years experience with this product and know how to get it to hardware monitor most devices and how to alert us in different manners. We have also tried other monitoring devices, such as Nagios, but feel that SNMPc is much more geared to monitoring hardware.
Information on our pricing can be found here