As part of our basic service, we proactively monitor the 24×7 uptime status for all of our dedicated leased lines, including T1, Metro Ethernet, and MegaNet Business Wireless connections. We’re able to monitor the uptime status of the physical connection, as well as the equipment on the customer’s side of the circuit. In addition to those bandwidth connections, we also monitor the uptime status of servers and VLANs hosted in our data centers, so we can help colocation customers in the event they suffer a hardware failure.
Whenever a dedicated Internet connection experiences a problem and goes down, our entire Network Operations Center staff receives an email and text message. Those messages let our staff know the customer name, the local contact name and contact information, IP addresses being monitored, and any associated circuit ID that might be needed for testing if the telco needs to get involved in testing or repairs.
Our first step is always to contact the customer to verify power and cabling, and it’s not uncommon for our client to wonder why we’re calling, as they themselves haven’t even noticed a problem with their Internet yet! Many times, outages are simply due to a local power issue (an outage or something like an employee accidentally pulling the wrong plug) or a bad or loose cable that connects their bandwidth service to their router, or perhaps the router to their network.
If the power and cabling check out, and the client reboots their equipment with no change, we’ll contact the loop or fiber carrier at that point while another MegaNet technician begins physically testing the connection. If we can see all the way to the customer’s jack at their office, we’ll continue to troubleshoot with the customer contact. If we can’t see the jack, that usually indicates a physical problem with the T1 or Metro Ethernet line itself, and we move on to working with the phone company while updating the customer. We handle all aspects of the troubleshooting process -we are very familiar with the different telco departments and procedures required in these instances, so we’ll make all of those calls while our customer gets back to their daily work tasks.
Once services are restored (sometimes it requires a technician dispatch to repair cabling or equipment, and sometimes it’s a “phantom fix”) we’ll contact the customer back to let them know their services are back up and what the outcome of the repair was. If the outage occurred with one of our colocation customers, we’ll log whether or not the client was able to repair services or if a Hot Hands dispatch was required. In most instances, we’ll keep our internal trouble ticket open for 24 hours just in case there’s a recurrence of the outage, or more followup is needed.
We use the same monitoring services with our customer bandwidth connections that we use on our own network to keep track of network health. On our network, we also monitor server-specific services on all of our servers as well, including web, email, and authentication servers. This allows us to see the usage and health of server cores, hard drives, memory, and more – we can proactively work on any network equipment to help prevent hardware failure and potential service downtime. We can also offer this specific level of monitoring to our clients as well as an add-on option to their bandwidth or colocation services.
The goal for any service provider is to offer the highest uptime available. Our network monitoring not only helps us keep our network up and running, it helps our clients keep their networks up as well.
If your business is interested in learning more about proactive network monitoring, potentially as part of your security or disaster recovery planning, download our free eBook today!
