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Support & Maintenance

Network maintenance and monitoring is an increasingly important and often neglected area in many businesses today.

We offer proactive solutions to help detect problems long before they have any adverse effects while keeping everyone as informed as they need to be on the health of your network. Many of these tools come already installed on the servers we build, and cost nothing to operate. We also develop our own tools for monitoring tasks to make sure all the bases are covered.

To offer an understanding of the types of tools we maintain, here are some examples of the tools we support on our servers or on clients remote servers.

• Network & System Statistics keep you informed
• Watchdog systems alert on outages
• Automated backups protect your critical data
• Custom scripts offer powerful monitoring abilities

Network & System Statistics

A variety of network monitoring tools are in place, to give you real time information on most aspects of operating services, computers and networks.

Example monitoring graph

Watchdog

Watchdog monitoring systems are used to verify that all critical services such as databases or web sites are responding properly. And if not, email and wireless notifications let administrators know.

A very important part of monitoring is making sure that automated process in fact do their job at the right time. At Zorin, we have developed a flexible web-based reporting system for monitoring local and remote process. Alerts are sent any time automated process do not complete, and send statistics on the result to the monitoring system. It can also alert if any of the statics are outside normal boundaries.

With automated processes, it is often the case that the cost of a failed event increases as time goes on. The sooner things are put right, the fewer problems as a result of the failure. Zorin's watchdog services provides critical early warning for important events such as customer data processing, backups and application specific tasks.

Web Application Alerts

Most systems we develop will send notifications if errors occur or other unusual conditions exist. This is key in responding to problems at the earliest opportunity.

Intrusion Detection Systems

Ensuring the integrity of servers is increasing in priority as the number and sophistication of Internet miscreants continues to increase. We help manage tools to detect abuses, and create ways to avoid trouble from outside.

Automated backups protect your critical data

Creating an automated backup system is a fairly trivial tasks with Linux systems. You can even backup non-Linux shared directories, or use non-Linux directories for automatic backup storage.

One scheme we often use involves making nightly archives of particular directory trees and storing them to a shared disk on physically separate machines. Rather than using tapes or removable disks to take backups off site, the shared hard drive on the backup server was simply removed and stored in a secure location. This method is very cost effective and offers fast access since the backup medium is a real hard disk rather than tape or other slow technologies.

As technologies change, backup scripts can be adapted to take advantage of any desired devices for storing system archives.

Custom scripts offer powerful monitoring abilities

In some situations, it may be beneficial to create custom scripts to perform application specific or unusual monitoring tasks. These can be stand alone scripts which can send pager messages, e-mail or any other action as appropriate.

Custom monitoring systems are easy to create using one of the many languages built into Linux distributions. Perl and Python are two commonly used languages for this purpose. These modern languages, make it fairly simple to create Internet servers or clients with a minimum of development time. And with their powerful pattern matching, and data manipulation abilities, powerful systems created easily.