Short article by Walter Heck

In this day and age, no matter what business you are in, you may be losing out if your internet market presence is not professionally managed. Your website is the face of your company, and your financial transactions conducted in cyberspace, businesses may even take place entirely within the e-market, rendering selling products and services physically obsolete in the near future. 

With this in mind, keeping your electronic sales transactions running smoothly without fault requires a degree of commitment to keep it going. A whole department may monitor closely at every aspect of one's business, simply because business is money and any slight misconduct will result in major loss of valuable assets and even jeopardize the company's integrity. 

Given the case if your website is suffering from down time, either from being not being able to support by customers at one time or has a problem at the data centre, will cause potential customers to be lost during the period of which it is down. It will also appear unprofessional to have the main website coming up with a blank page, and they may even feel cheated for being mistakenly pointed out to a dead end. 

Or another worse case scenario would be that, picture an automated business selling flowers on-line, without the preemptive measures to calculate the amount of disk space available to store its customer database and caused hundreds of orders to be voided during the week before Valentines Day. That is a crisis we strive to prevent, after all prevention is better than cure. A simple reminder to increase disk space would have saved hundreds in profit. 

So that's where we come in, Tribily gives you the peace of mind, to know that these events will not happen to your business. However, companies may be skeptical in handing over their privacy, safety and security to subject to third-party monitoring services. To understand what we offer, it is important to first know that any business which requires server monitoring will usually adopt one of the following two approaches: 

1. In-House Monitoring - You install your choice of server monitoring application and handle monitoring yourself. 

Advantages of In-House Monitoring

• Everything is Under Your Control
• Quicker Response Times to Critical Events
• More Secure As Everything is Under Internal Control
• Covers a Wider Range of Monitoring Services
• Technically More flexible

Disadvantages of In-House Monitoring

• Specific skilled personnel are required. 
• May not be cost-effective due to cost of manpower required. 
• Regular maintenance required. 
• Risk of hardware failure, resulting in total loss. 

 
2. External Monitoring - You outsource your server monitoring to a third-party and pay them for their expertise as well as their services. 

Advantages of External Monitoring

• Dedicated expertise specially developed to handle monitoring issues. 
• Cheaper and more effective than in-house monitoring. 
• Client is not required to own or purchase monitoring infrastructure. 
• Client can devote resources to other issues instead of focusing on monitoring. 

Disadvantages of External Monitoring

• Response times to critical events slower than with in-house monitoring. 
• No access to critical server internals for monitoring purposes. 
• Most external monitoring services offer a lesser range of services than in-house monitoring. 
• Monitoring access is restricted to limited and otherwise public data i.e. ping time / latency measurements and accessible ports. 

 
 We offer the best of both worlds to server monitoring as a service, a hybrid of both in-house and external monitoring methods. This approach involves access to important hardware internals such as hard drive and memory usage, which in turn provides us with a means to keep our clients more accurately informed. Privacy will not be an issue as we will not be able to access the data in your drives, only the hardware itself. 

If there's any issue concerning server monitoring that I didn't address, please do not hesitate ask me directly at walter@tribily.com.