7.2 What Service Monitoring Can Help You Do

The most obvious benefit to running a service monitor is that it gives you early warning of failures. Practically speaking, this allows you to fix a problem before it becomes an even larger problem. If a piece of hardware fails in the middle of the night, you have the chance to repair or replace it before the start of business the next day. Or say you have a piece of network hardware whose sole purpose is to provide redundancy for another piece of hardware. When the primary device fails, the backup is configured to take over gracefully. If the primary fails and it goes unnoticed for months, what happens if the backup hardware fails as well?

Monitoring software can also help determine where in your network a problem resides. Users typically report problems only from their own point of view. If a connection serving hundreds of users goes down and you rely on user reports to notify administrators when something is wrong, by the time reports come in, there may be an overwhelming number of cases to deal with and it may not be immediately clear where the problem really is.

Additionally, it is always in your best interest to know about problems before either your customers or your superiors do, regardless of how quickly you intend to take action. There is nothing more embarrassing than hearing that a core service is down from one of them first.

In daily use, you will typically ignore the system polling software until it pages you or otherwise notifies you of a problem condition. You may also view the status of monitored services on a Web page such as the one in Figure 7.2. Here, the darker line indicates a service that is not responding, and the lighter lines are servers that are functioning without any problem.

Figure 7.2. Sample Sysmon Status Web Page.