Hardware monitoring
- If your servers are from a Tier 1 vendor (e.g. HP, Dell) then they most likely will have ‘Out of Bounds’ management capabilities installed (Dell = DRAC, HP = ILO).
- These ‘Out of Bounds’ systems have the ability to monitor the internal hardware components of your servers and can provide alerts when faults are detected – and sometimes even before faults occur! (i.e. they can predict hardware failures).
- Of course, to take advantage of this feature, the alerts need to be configured. However because the configuration of the alerts is not entirely straight-forward, in our experience frequently these alerts are not configured.
- Where you have Servers with redundant components (e.g. power supplies, storage devices), provided that you’re aware of the faults, the components can often be replaced by the vendor without any downtime.
Disk space monitoring
- Any Windows system that runs low on (or out of) disk space on any volume will typically experience degraded performance at the very least – or worse applications will either stop working altogether or will start behaving “unusually”. All of these outcomes will be disruptive to users.
- Configure disk space monitoring on servers by setting thresholds / alerts for each logical volume; so that in the case of low disk space, intervention can be taken before any disruptions to services occur.
Security patches
- Particularly on servers that are accessible from the Internet (i.e. servers that provide services to external users) and thus are far more susceptible to ‘attack’ from malicious third parties; ensure that Microsoft and 3rd party application security patches are regularly reviewed and applied to protect against known vulnerabilities.