As a support company, LAN Systems are always trying to find new ways to better support our customers and we have often wished for a method of pre-empting possible system problems.

With this in mind, we have developed a complete monitoring package which allows us to automatically check various critical parts of customers network systems and for engineers to be alerted in the event of a failure or potential problem.

In addition to reporting/alerting on a large number of system components, we can also produce statistical analysis of disk space, memory, cpu usage and various network related settings.

Unlike most monitoring systems which rely on the monitoring server being able to 'ping' the remote machine or 'query' specific information directly, we have developed a small 'agent' (called LanRemote) which is installed on each computer and periodically sends performace information to our central server, this means that no changes are needed to your security setup and if temporary network problems are preventing connections to our central monitoring server, LanRemote will queue the data until it can talk to our server.

The result of these failures can be catostrophic for companies who have no method of monitoring the result of backups as (in very extreme cases) all of the companies data can be lost. By pro-actively monitoring the status of backup jobs, LAN Systems can quickly determine the status of your backups and take action if necessary to correct problems (we can't put the tapes in for you though!).

Most modern backup solutions have a method of emailling an operator to inform them of the status of the backup. In our experience. we have found that this is not always an ideal solution as most people will react when they get an email to tell them that the backup has failed but they will not notice if they fail to receive an email. This can happen if the backup software is not operating correctly and is often very serious as it can mean that no backup is being performed.

The LAN Systems Monitoring system together with our LanRemote agent has a solution to this problem, we utilize another monitoring technique called 'service freshness'. This allows us to not only check whether a backup succeeded or failed but it also gives us a failsafe, if we have not received a report on the status of a backup for a pre-determined time, the backup service is deemed to have 'gone stale' and our engineers will be alerted to a potential problem.

LAN Systems have now completed the implementation of our monitoring system for customers with a service contract, during the implementation we received various requests for the ability to monitor other services (including VPN links to remote sites and Internet connections) so we now have an enormous number of options that we can configure to provide a complete monitoring solution.

If you would like more information on network monitoring or any other service offered by LAN Systems, please contact the Sales Department on 0116 223 0033.