IT Support Services: Modern Proactive Maintenance

Maintenance Services for Computer were a very big part  of Technical Services in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  In those days, computers used to be much bigger than current PC’s and contained a lot of electronics and removable parts.  In most cases, even mini-computers required to be installed in a dedicated and controlled environment (Server Room).

Most of the maintenance tasks were physical and included shutting down the computer, cleaning up air filters, vacuuming bays and power supplies and taking a lot of electronic measurements using an oscilloscope.  In addition all peripheral devices such as tape drives, disk drives, printers also required a lot of preventive maintenance.  It was not uncommon to schedule a preventive maintenance once a week for a 4-6 hours duration.

These days, most computers, including powerful data center servers don’t require the same type of services but preventive maintenance is still very much needed.  It is now commonly called “Proactive Maintenance” and mostly includes system updates, firmware updates, data integrity checks.  We not longer pull the oscilloscope  to check the “noise level” on the leads of a power supply but we check the system logs that are monitoring the power supplies of the computers.

Good Proactive Maintenance require good understanding of log management as most computer issues are automatically recorded on the hard disk. monitoring all server event logs monitoring for proper AV updates and activity monitoring backup status, whether on-site or remote monitoring firewall activity, hack/spam relay attempts monitoring system bottlenecks (system processes, processor/ram utilization, etc.) monitoring application services (Exchange, Web Services, etc.).  If you can identify and correct small problems before they have a chance to develop into larger issues, chances are that you will be preventing many problems from occurring.  It is a known fact that most businesses can’t properly operate without their computers and downtime can be very costly so proactive maintenance must absolutely be an essential part of your IT strategy.