How monitoring and automation fix problems before you notice

Most IT problems give warning signs before anyone notices them: a disk filling up, a service that keeps restarting, a backup that failed last night. Monitoring watches for those signs. Automation fixes the common ones without waiting for someone to report a problem.

A worked example

A server runs the software your business depends on. Every few weeks it slows to a crawl. The cause is a known fault: a background service gets stuck and needs restarting.

Without monitoring and automation:

1. Staff notice things are slow and put up with it for a while.
2. Someone eventually calls or emails for support.
3. The request is logged and triaged. Because nothing is fully down, it may not be top priority.
4. A technician investigates, finds the stuck service and restarts it.

The business has lost hours of slow work before anyone starts fixing it.

With monitoring and automation:

1. Monitoring spots the warning sign in the server’s logs.
2. A ticket is raised automatically.
3. A tested fix runs: the service is restarted.
4. Monitoring checks again to confirm the problem has cleared.
5. If it has, the ticket records what happened and closes.
6. If it has not, the ticket goes to a technician to investigate.

Often nobody in the office notices anything happened.

Automation needs care

Automation is powerful, which is also why it needs discipline. A fix that runs on the wrong machine, or at the wrong time, can cause the outage it was meant to prevent. Any automated fix should be:

• Tested on non-production systems first.
• Rolled out in stages, a few machines at a time, not all at once.
• Logged, so every automatic action can be seen and traced.
• Limited to known, well-understood problems. Anything unusual goes to a person.

What it means for you

Fewer interruptions, faster fixes for the common problems, and technicians spending their time on the problems that actually need them.

On our Managed IT plans: your devices are monitored around the clock. Alerts outside helpdesk hours are picked up the next business day unless you’ve approved after-hours work. With Security Pro, Huntress’s security team also watches your devices 24x7 and can isolate a compromised device at any hour.

Questions to ask any IT provider

• What do you monitor, and what happens when an alert fires out of hours?
• Which problems do you fix automatically?
• How do you test an automated fix before it runs on our systems?
• Can we see a report of what was fixed and when?

If you would like to know how this works for your business, book a meeting or read about Managed IT.