Monitoring Your Monitor and Other Critical Services

One important aspect of monitoring overlooked in most environments is ensuring that the tools you are using to monitor are up and running. In the event of a problem with your monitor tools, how will you monitor your environment? Remember that essential Windows services, such as RPC for a server cluster, must be monitored to ensure that they are available. Monitoring these things goes beyond the normal monitoring of a database or a server for performance through System Monitor or SQL Server Profiler. You need to have redundant monitoring systems in place so that your monitoring center will never miss a beat. There is nothing worse than end users or customers experiencing a problem when the people on the other end are unaware because they do not even know the monitoring system is down.