server monitoring

Current Project: Winsitter.com

Bret Fisher

Jan 27, 2012 • 1 min read

This blog has seen less action over the last year due to my activities related to a personal obsession of mine: Creating a web startup to help keep Windows Servers up and running on autopilot.

As a consulting engineer for various small and large organizations, I can say it is the norm for users to actually be de facto monitoring solution. They are the first to know of an outage. Many small and medium business admins settle for this because they (and management) seem to assume that either:

Good server monitoring is expensive or too hard to even consider.
That it's possible to prevent some outages with basic monitoring.

All this goes on while server manufactures and the Windows Server OS doesn't offer the one feature they need: a basic built-in notification service for the 20% of issues that cause 80% of the problems. Hardware and OS's tend to log the problems, but those get lost in a sea of log data. Why doesn't my Dell server ask me for an email address to notify of hardware errors/warnings on first boot? Why doesn't Windows have a one-button option to turn on basic email alerting of service failures, unplanned reboots, or other monitoring 101 stuff?

Well enough wishing. Time we did something about that for those who don't have the time, budget, server recourses, or skills to deploy an in-house monitoring solution.