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Today, having a web site involves more than just advertising product to potential customers. Aside from critical internal applications, a business depends highly on their external network hardware such as web and email servers. The external web server is often a business' bread and butter. Down time on an ecommerce web server can mean a loss in thousands of dollars for even a small business.
Without a good network monitoring system, your web site could be down and you would not know it unless a customer called to complain. By then, it could be too late as customers become frustrated and move on to another web site. The web server is just one of the major components to an advanced network design. Email servers, firewalls, databases, DNS, and FTP servers are all important factors when having a complete design that your customers use to communicate with your service. Network monitoring services can alert you within minutes when any of these components fail. It can send a message to key personnel to pagers, email, and cell phones. Software such as Servers Alive will even broadcast to instant messenger clients. Instant messenger services have become a mainstay in communication tools throughout a corporate network. It has taken over email as a clearly efficient way for users to communicate quickly within the office. Network monitoring software can send messages to network administrators instantly making them aware of critical hardware or software that might be failing. Network monitoring tools should not simply test common protocols, but it should also check for dependencies. Simply checking to make sure your HTTP host responds, does not answer other questions such as disk space, memory performance, and connectivity to the database server. When you choose a network monitoring solution, it should have a configurable interface and options to make sure any underlying dependencies are also working as expected. Although most companies focus on keeping their hardware and software as advanced as possible, it is also as critical to choose the perfect network monitoring software. Servers Alive by Woodstone has a great network monitoring tool that checks the status of all the critical components of your network. Its interface allows you to easily configure different alerts, features, and options that suit your information technology platform needs. It can keep your network administers notified of critical down time, and it can even provide output for managers to analyze solutions. |
