Server Monitoring and Outage Management Suite

In today’s online world, any downtime of your web presence has a costly impact in terms of lost sales, disappointed customers and wasted advertising resources. Designing and implementing a solid technical architecture is essential, but things can (and inevitably will) break. Companies that are serious about their online presence need a comprehensive monitoring solution to detect outages immediately and notify operations teams so they can resolve outages as quickly and efficiently as possible. NEXT-EM in cooperation with PANOPTA offers a complete Server Monitoring Service and Outage Management System for online businesses and service providers that goes beyond basic outage detection and notification. We allow you to complete the outage lifecycle by providing your team tools to facilitate outage resolution and then learn from what has been done in order to avoid future outages. With this functionality, now your team can actually improve overall availability rather than just monitoring downtime.

Advanced Server Monitoring

Today's websites are becoming more and more complex, involving dynamic content, mashup content from multiple sources, backend web services, email, chat and other communication mechanisms. Each component of this infrastructure must be monitored to ensure that outages at any level are detected. The Monitoring Control Panel presents monitoring configuration and real-time monitoring data, making it easy to monitor a single server or hundreds of servers around the world. Complete monitoring: All critical services that can impact availability are checked, including frequently overlooked services such as third-party visitor tracking and advertisement placement tools that can potentially interfere with your website's performance. High-frequency checks: Checks are performed every 60 seconds to provide a complete picture of availability without missing even short outages. Intelligent startup tools: We analyze your online presence and determine the services that need to be monitored. Even for relatively basic online businesses, we typically find 15 or more critical services that can impact availability. Comprehensive reporting: Daily, weekly and monthly reports are distributed on server availability and outage histories in order to verify SLA compliance and increase visibility of IT performance to managers and executives.

Intelligent Outage Notification

Once an outage is detected, it is immediately confirmed with checks from multiple geographic locations in order to avoid false positive alerts. After the outage is confirmed, our notification system takes control to notify you of the problem. Unlike some systems where users simply provide an email address that is contacted once the outage is detected, our system allows for very complex alert sequences, escalating the outage to a wider audience the longer the outage persists. The Control Panel allows you to create custom notification timelines to control outage notification based on your team's needs. Each timeline specifies when and whom to notify for a given server outage. The timeline interface allows you to see exactly what your schedule looks like and make necessary changes easily.

Outage Management

Dealing with an outage, especially of a high-value system, can be time consuming and chaotic, often resulting in over-utilizing key resources. NEXT-EM in cooperation with PANOPTA fully equips your team with information and communication tools to operate as efficiently as possible until the outage is resolved. Outage logs become tools you can use to review what went wrong and prevent future occurrences.

During an Outage

The first thing you need when faced with an unexpected outage is as much information as possible. The Outage Management Command Center (OMCC) provides a consolidated outage interface that gives an overview of the current problem. It provides crucial information to assess the situation: the pre-outage server state, detailed check results, and a clear picture of available resources. The second thing you need is tools to help your team communicate. The OMCC is a centralized place for teams to meet during an outage and coordinate a response. The OMCC brings together several forms of communication, including:

• An outage-specific email list, where messages are automatically broadcast to everyone involved in the outage. Outage notices are automatically tied into the list - simply reply to the notice and your response is routed to everyone involved in the outage.
• A web-based chat room where your team can discuss the situation in real-time. This is a pure web tool, with no software to install and configure.

All email and chat messages are added to the Outage Log so that people joining later in an outage can get up to speed quickly on what's been done. More importantly, it lets your operations staff concentrate on resolving the problem without getting pulled away repeatedly to give status updates on the situation. These tools make it easy for operations teams to respond to outages in a timely, efficient manner. And, because this infrastructure is hosted on our redundant servers, it is not affected by the very outages that you are attempting to manage.

After an Outage

Once you have resolved the source of the outage, it's important to make sure that you prevent the same problem from occurring again in the future. Oftentimes, many details of what was done in the heat of the moment are lost, and the same type of outage repeats again and again. Ending this cycle is a crucial step to improving the overall availability of your online presence. Fortunately, with teams working in the OMCC throughout an outage, all the details of what you have done are captured and are available to review after things have calmed down, rather than being lost to groggy memories or the next problem that comes up. Outage logs are archived permanently for examination, whether it's the next day or six months down the road when a similar problem arises.

Getting Started

It is easy to get started monitoring of your online infrastructure. The entire infrastructure is accessed through the web-based control panel, with no software to install. With our intuitive account signup and monitoring configuration process, you can get everything set up within minutes.