Compuquip

Due to the popularity of the Top 10 Outlook Calendar Tips blog post, we thought a follow-up to that would be beneficial. Since there is a plethora of information available for making your Outlook Calendar work for you, we’ve condensed the list. And now for our Top 10 picks. Check them out!

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Remote or cloud-based storage solutions have been around for many years. The pendulum between local on-premises storage (and control) and cloud-based storage services has shifted several times over the course of storage technology development. Storage location and control has changed with the dominance of mainframes, client/server, PC, and the changes in price and capabilities of storage. Cloud technology is the latest iteration of this trend, providing additional cost and capacity options and flexibility for storage users.

As cloud technology takes shape it can be difficult to define the capabilities and benefits of this technology, however, there are two areas of cloud computing that have some very persuasive benefits: cloud storage and cloud backup/recovery.

While storage and backup in the cloud are slightly different services for slightly different needs, they both allow users to scale storage space requirements to meet expanding requirements, improve manageability, and can be integrated easily to backup most all aspects of a businesses’ data requirements, from server to laptop. Though cloud-based solutions have been around for many years, the success of companies like SalesForce.com, the advances in technology, and economic benefits have reached a tipping point in terms of realizing the cost-effective benefits of cloud-based storage solutions. Read more »

Part II of II: Virtual Desktops 101

Welcome back to Virtual Desktops 101. In Part 1, we define Virtual Desktops and began to look at some of the advantages.  We continue here with that same topic.

I’m sold. Where do I sign up?

Slow down! It’s not all wine and roses; there are some things to consider.

• First and foremost, while you can save a good amount of money at the endpoint, you do need to make an investment in your Datacenter environment.

• Virtualizing and managing a handful of Desktops is easy; scaling this up to hundreds or even thousands of Virtual Desktops is hard. There are storage considerations (both capacity and performance), RAM and CPU considerations, and management considerations. Referring to the graphic from Part 1 of this blog, the Management piece is critical for you to truly make the most of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

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Bill, the IT Director at a law firm, received the emergency call at 6am. A pipe had ruptured in the firm’s building and the server room was flooded. Bill knew it was going to be a long few days. First he’d have to repair or probably replace the hardware, spend hours rebuilding the system software, retrieve the right tapes from an offsite storage facility and then restore the data. Theoretically, it would take several long days of effort but should all work just fine. Unfortunately for Bill, reality set in. After replacing the hardware and installing the system software, many of the firm’s data tapes were unreadable and they lost 50% of their data. Read more »

In today’s world there is no room for IT problems, effective monitoring and alerting for distributed, interconnected systems is necessary for the successful operation of any organization. Proactive monitoring of servers, workstations, remote computers, Windows event logs and applications is critical to security, network performance and to the overall operation of the organization.

In this post I will address what we monitor, and some of the methods we use. We are currently monitoring over 3500 different devices, so doing that with the utmost efficiency is a must. There are several tools that we use for monitoring here at Compuquip, and I have blogged about LVRTG® before (a proprietary monitoring tool for email), and you have probably seen the very popular blog post about PRTG® (a commercial monitoring tool that lets us see anything from Net Flow to SNMP traps)  but for the majority of monitoring and alerting we use Kaseya®. This management platform provides us with proactive, user defined monitoring and instant notification of problems. Best of all it allows us to manage all 3500+ endpoints, without pulling our hair out.

Our system provides five methods of monitoring, each with many monitoring functions, and so I am only going to be able touch on a few of them for each method:

• Alerts Section: This is where we are monitoring server event logs for errors or warnings, disk space, as well as hardware changes and the status of the system as a whole (online/offline). Severe errors or alerts generate a ticket and an immediate email to the NOC team, other events may only generate a ticket. I would estimate that about 25% of the alerts that we receive come from this method of alerting.
• Monitor Sets: Monitoring the performance state of a server is what gives us the ability to be proactive in solving our client’s problems, before they even become problems. Using monitoring sets, we create several groups of criteria that we believe would identify a problem on a server. So for example, on a Microsoft Exchange email server, we might apply a monitor set specific to Exchange servers. Within that monitor set we would have configured a number of issues that often indicate problems on an Exchange server.  The set would have a threshold for the mail queues, alerting once x number of emails are queued up, and a check for the services and processes specific to Exchange, alerting if their states change. Monitor sets are highly customizable and make up about 60% of alerts.
• System Check: System checks allow us to monitor devices that don’t have a Kaseya agent, like a router, switch or even an application. Using this method we can setup a server that does have an agent installed, to do a “check” of another system or device. We use this type of monitoring to verify our client’s WAN (wide area network) is online. We setup ICMP message from one server at Customer site A to a router at customer site B, and vice versa. By customizing the alert message, when one of the sites does not respond we are able to tell instantly when a site has gone down. System checks also allow for website monitoring, and some additional custom monitoring.

The last two monitoring methods, Log Monitoring and SNMP Sets, are not used on every end point but instead are setup on a case by case basis. I am going to save these two for a later blog.

Once an alert is triggered several things happen:

• Email notification: Depending on the severity, an email may be sent out to the NOC team, for triage.
• Ticket generation: Regardless of the severity of the alert (they are all of concern or we would not be alerting on it), a ticket is created. At the instant an alert is generated, Kaseya interfaces with our ticketing system and enters a ticket under the correct company/client, and that ticket is given a status of new.
• Continuous alerting until resolution: After the first alert has come through the system our monitoring platform continues to monitor the issue and continues to alert on it, without creating a new ticket. It will continue to alert until the problem has been fixed and of course we will continue to monitor.

Stay tuned for my next post where I share how we actually respond to the alert/ticket.