Nothing threatens the bottom-line of a medical or dental office as much as unexpected downtime. The inability to review charts and treat patients can impact not only daily revenues, but it can also affect the image of your practice. As your practice moves toward electronic records, your technology dependence grows and network analytics become an invaluable tool for support.
Workstation Anayltics
Instituting 24×7 network monitoring through a Managed Services Provider produces detailed, real-time logs of performance and activity. Resource usage such as CPU, memory, processes and tasks, disk usage, and other vital aspects of your network is securely kept in logs stored off-site. These logs are used routinely when diagnosing issues such as slowness or downtime by pinpointing resource-heavy processes.
Consider a slow-running PC. Calling tech support generally begins with a series of questions – did you reboot? Check the cables? Possible malware? With prospective reporting through Network Management, this information is at the fingertips of the technician. Detailed CPU and memory usage is tracked and graphed, with details as to which processes are contributing to resource usage.
Server Analytics
As with workstations, servers also provide detailed performance data as it relates to CPU, Memory, and Disk Usage; but leveraging software management in a server environment is even more powerful. Individual sensors on your Windows Server have readings for temperatures, fan speeds, RAID status, and power supply health. Additionally, network services that reside on the server such as Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, DNS, and other services that are vital to your network infrastructure are actively monitored and logged on your IT provider’s server.
The key to server monitoring is the instant email notifications to your Managed Service Provider. The instant that one of these services has a failure or a warning, your IT company knows – this changes the nature of your IT support. Instead of you needing to call your IT company with a downed server necessitating hours of diagnosis, you get a call FROM your IT company letting you know that a particular service needs to be restarted or optimized on your server. The potential to mitigate possible downtime in this scenario is huge, and well worth the price.
Network Equipment Analytics
The final piece of the Network Management model is the installation of Managed Switches and Routers. With a “software probe”, your IT company can monitor each port for traffic anomalies or disruptions in connections. With this service, if a PC loses its internet connection or its connection to the server, a managed switch has the potential to tell the technician right away if the network port is active, and exactly when and where the service is disrupted. Managed switches and routers eliminate many steps of troubleshooting.
Let your IT company work for you
Imagine the power of having a fully managed network. Your IT company calls you before there is a problem for most of the issues you are experiencing – and when your IT company is called for troubleshooting, the tools at their disposal makes diagnosis and remedy efficient. dmi Networking has the expertise to manage your network and reduce your risk of downtime. For more information, see our Dental IT solutions.