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Software for network administration

Tools that stop administration being firefighting. You can see what is in the estate, what the hardware is doing right now and where something has gone wrong.

Monitoring
we know before the staff do
Asset inventory
it builds itself
Updates
from one place
Open source
solutions without licences

What the work includes

For a typical organisation freely available software is enough. Buying a product makes sense with a sizeable estate and strict reporting requirements.

Discuss the scope

Monitoring

Whether the servers and network devices respond, what state they are in, whether the services and links are alive.

Asset inventory

The software scans the network itself and collects details of the machines and installed applications.

Licences

We reconcile what is installed against what is paid for. Discrepancies turn up in both directions.

Remote access

Connecting to an employee's computer to help, with every session recorded.

Updates

Centralised patch deployment instead of walking round the offices.

Alerts

We set the thresholds and recipients so the emails get read rather than filed away.

How it goes

The basic set is deployed in a week or two, including tuning the alert thresholds.

01

We assess

The size of the estate, the number of sites, what hurts right now.

02

We select

Open source or paid tools depending on the scale and the requirements.

03

We launch

We deploy it, connect the nodes and configure the rules and alerts.

04

We fine-tune

In the first weeks we adjust the thresholds to remove false alerts.

Monitoring that showers you with false alarms is worse than none at all. Within a fortnight the administrator stops opening those emails and a real outage drowns in the noise. That is why the thresholds are tuned to your infrastructure rather than left at factory defaults.

Questions and answers

For a hundred or so devices the free tools are enough: they have long been polished and cover almost any need. A paid product is justified for ready-made reports, vendor support and estates of several hundred machines and more.

A spreadsheet is out of date a day after it is filled in. An automated scan shows the real picture: which builds are installed, on which machines patches failed to apply, where memory has been added. It also gives you a basis for reconciling what is paid for against what is installed.

The availability of servers and network hardware, free disk space and the outcome of the backup job. Those four items cover most of the outages you would otherwise hear about from angry staff.

We will select the tools for your administrator

Describe your estate and tell us what is getting in the way now. We will propose a toolkit, starting with the free options.