Email is probably the most critical communication medium for any organization and one of the main priorities for the Rocketseed technical team is to deliver a solution that is rock solid and performs well. Managing these business critical systems means applying a proactive approach, it is essential to know about issues that could escalate into interruption of service before they do. This is why Rocketseed is implementing an updated monitoring system across all its system installations and cloud platforms.
Why monitor ?
The biggest and most obvious reason is to be aware of any issues as they happen, the faster you know about a problem the quicker you can attend and resolve it but monitoring offers much more benefits such as
Performance trends, by tracking the systems performance over time we can identify trends, this information is extremely handy for maintenance planning and understanding how the systems are being used.
Capacity planning, most systems that run databases tend to grow over time and when you are dealing with mail these information stores can expand rapidly as your business grows. It is essential to know the rate of growth so you can plan hardware requirements and budget accordingly.
Identify bottlenecks, by monitoring individual components of the system we can spot bottlenecks, this information is fed back to our technical team so they know where they need to look to further improve the systems.
Security issues, being able to monitor system access and essential configuration information changes gives you an additional layer of security as we know who is accessing the system and when something is changed without the proper change control process being followed. The system is also trained to alert the technical team if it is not running the latest software security updates.
What do we monitor ?
Most monitoring solutions will just keep an eye on the basic hardware performance and if the system is available or not, Rocketseed goes one further by monitoring the application level where we ensure that all the components of the system is functioning and functioning optimally. The system also tracks log file errors, software versions, file changes and even tests server configurations.
How do we monitor ?
Each Rocketseed installation has an monitoring agent installed that collects all the data from the server and sends the information back to the main monitoring system where the data is analysed and decisions are made to alert the technical team of simply log the information to be presented in a system report. An agent approach give you the following benefits
- Increased server, services, and application availability
- Fast detection of server and operating system failures
- Fast detection of service and application failures
- Increased monitoring capabilities
- Increased administrative control
What we have planned for the future?
Our next aim is to automate the system so that it can deploy solutions for known issues without any user intervention to give our customers the best possible experience with minimal interruption to service.
