The Upgrade Equation

Karin Magness :: kmagness@sagesol.com

Everyday at SAGE, we face many of the same problems our clients do in managing and getting the most out of technology, how to be more productive, or just to work smarter.  For us, the success of our OnSight Managed IT Service created a challenge: how to perform daily checks on over a 100 servers initially, with scores more to follow. We needed a way to quickly determine a server’s health at a glance, especially when it is one of hundreds of servers being watched. To meet SAGE’s high quality of customer service, we needed verification of daily checks for OnSight managers and clients. When other solutions in the marketplace didn’t meet the challenges we were facing, we developed our own: Sentinel.

Sentinel is lightweight agent technology with a dashboard web interface that allows us to remotely perform daily server checks on scores of servers throughout our client network. This not only saves significant time but it improving our ability to spot potential trouble before it results in downtime. Our engineers can quickly discern a server’s health based on 6 indicators and log entries, without the laborious task of remoting to the server and navigating through countless administrative screens. Furthermore, Sentinel collects data throughout the day, displayed day and night on a web interface for our engineers and managers to monitor regardless of location. So even if after the daily check has been completed, should a drive suddenly fill up or an Exchange mail queue grow exponentially, SAGE will be aware and respond.

When we began offering OnSight service, SAGE President George Nicholson demanded we exceed our already high standard of service. Daily server checks are crucial to maintaining a well managed network, and since putting an engineer at every clients site wasn’t realistic, Engineering Services Manager Lisa Johnson needed a way for SAGE engineers to check servers without physically touching each one. SAGE’s Chief Engineer, Doug Daniel, and head software architect, Matt Daniel, (yes, they are related) teamed up to develop a small footprint software agent that resides on a host server to handle the monitoring. The agent uses secure protocols to communicate with the client’s servers, and then passes that information to Sentinel’s dashboard, all without installing any software on the client’s servers. This combination of agent and web technology made it possible for SAGE to check and watch scores of servers without physically being present or creating a remote connection to each server.

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