Continuous automated monitoring of servers, endpoints, backups and network hardware, with alerts triaged by Australian engineers rather than emailed to you.
What monitoring is for
Reactive IT support has a structural problem: you only hear about a fault once it has already cost someone their morning. Monitoring exists to move the detection point earlier — ideally to before anyone notices, and at worst to before the failure becomes an outage.
In practice, a large share of what we fix in a given month was never reported by a person. A disk reporting errors, a backup job that started failing after a software update, a volume that has been quietly filling since a log rotation broke, a server that has not applied patches in six weeks because an update is stuck. None of those generate a phone call until the day they generate a very bad one.
What we monitor
- Servers, physical and virtual: availability, disk health and capacity, memory and CPU pressure, critical service state.
- Endpoints: patch compliance, disk health, security agent health, and the early indicators of hardware failure.
- Backups: whether jobs completed, and whether the result is actually restorable. This is the one that most often turns up broken on a new client’s first audit.
- Network hardware: firewalls, switches and access points reporting over SNMP, so a failed uplink is visible rather than inferred from complaints.
- Microsoft 365 tenant health: service advisories and identity events relevant to your tenant.
The honest version of “24/7”
Nearly every managed IT provider in Australia advertises 24/7 monitoring, and it is worth unpacking what it means, because the phrase does a lot of quiet work.
The monitoring is genuinely continuous. Agents report around the clock and automated remediation for defined conditions runs at any hour — a service restarted at 2am does not wait for morning.
What is not continuous, here or at most providers our size, is a human being watching a dashboard overnight. Our engineers work 08:00 to 17:30 on weekdays, with after-hours response to critical incidents available under most agreements. If a provider implies otherwise, ask them who is rostered on at 3am and what their name is.
Alert tuning is the actual work
Deploying monitoring is easy. Making it useful is not. Out of the box, any monitoring platform generates enough noise to be ignored within a fortnight, and ignored alerts are worse than no alerts because they create the impression of coverage.
The first few weeks of an engagement are spent tuning thresholds against your real workload — what constitutes high disk usage on a file server is not what it means on a database host — so that an alert reliably indicates something worth acting on.
What it costs
Monitoring and reporting are the whole of the Basic plan at $50 per computer per month, ex GST. Every plan above it includes the same monitoring, plus the support needed to act on what it surfaces — which, for most businesses, is the part that matters.