University of Illinois System

System Monitoring, Alerting and Availability

Service Description

The System Monitoring , Alerting and Availability Service provides a 24/7 watchful eye on critical business services as well as the means to provide real time alerting capabilities in the event a system becomes unavailable.

AITS has an assortment of system, network and application
monitoring tools to provide a customized monitoring solution to meet the needs for the business requirements.

This service includes flexible notification and alerting methods, including standard methods — e-mail, SNMP trap, and pager (including support for SMS devices) — and additional methods, such as HTTP post and database alerts. In addition, it has the ability to escalate an alert according to rules defined by the user. Achieve the ability to alert on call support staff in order to provide a critical, timely response in the event a critical service is unavailable. You are able to respond before your users start flooding your help desk with system problem requests.

In addition, customized daily, weekly or monthly reports can be generated and automatically sent out to interested parties for single and multiple monitor readings as well as built in management type reports. We are also able to provide calculations for system availability numbers in order to meet the needs for SLAs.

Benefits

  • 24/7, 365 days per year system and application monitoring
  • Daily, weekly or monthly reporting capabilities on availability and performance
  • Real time alerting
  • System availability calculations
  • Agent-less monitoring that replicates an end user experience
  • Offers solution templates that include specialized monitors, default metrics, proactive tests, and best practices

Hours of Availability

This service is available to customers 24/7, excluding planned outages, maintenance windows and unavoidable events. Maintenance windows are used only when needed for planned changes that have gone through the AITS Change Control Process. In addition to the standard AITS maintenance windows, site-specific and service-specific changes may be coordinated with customers at non-standard times.

Standard maintenance windows are defined as:

  • 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. each Sunday when application usage is at its lowest
  • After 5 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, unless business needs to make a change during business hours
  • The second Wednesday of the month from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. for patching Microsoft servers
  • 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. three Sundays a year for routine Windows and Linux maintenance

It is to be expected that downtime for monitoring systems will be minimal due to the nature of the service in which they provide. The expected downtime will vary based on the solution that is built and the monitoring tools that are specifically involved.

How Do We Charge?

Pricing will be based on the number of hours needed to implement the customized solution as well as any associated software licensing costs depending on the chosen monitoring solution.