Monitoring and Daily Checks

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• Security: unexpected open ports, out-of-date software, configuration changes and attacks on sign-in pages.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.