The rapid rise of cloud services such as Microsoft Office 365 means that the servers within your company have a slightly lighter workload, but of course there are still plenty of other applications running on your devices. In most SMEs, servers are still the beating heart of the IT infrastructure. Below are three things you can keep an eye on yourself to stay ahead of unexpected problems.
Servers run all kinds of applications, such as email, business applications, SharePoint, and, for example, ERP software. In addition, they are where all your data—which is critical to your business—is stored. It goes without saying that you want to minimize the risks associated with this as much as possible. Therefore, keep in mind that servers are not devices that can be set up once and then left to run for several years without maintenance.
Hardware
First, it’s important that the server’s hardware is in good working order. This is because some server components are prone to wear and tear. Hard drives, in particular, contain many moving parts—spinning disks, moving read/write heads, and so on. A server is also full of fans that run continuously to cool the system and collect a lot of dust.
Your server often has indicator lights that show the status of the most important hardware components. Green means everything is OK; red means there’s bad news. Contact your IT partner as soon as possible if a light turns red. Your systems may still be running, but sooner or later they’ll stop working.
Generally, your server manufacturer’s website also offers software tools to check whether a server’s hardware status is OK. One example of such a tool is HP’s System Management Homepage. This web interface allows you to check the server’s status at a glance.
Disk capacity
A second important item to check on a server is disk capacity. Every year, you collect a great deal of data in your various applications—think of all the emails received and sent, customer databases, files, and so on. All of this systematically takes up more space on your server. When the hard drives in your server are 90% full, your applications will start to crash. This is because they still need some free space to use as temporary working files. Once that space runs out, it’s game over. You can easily check available capacity using Windows Explorer on your server. Here, you can see the free space on all hard drives at a glance. You can temporarily remove some files or large folders from your server to free up some space, but discuss with your IT partner how best to resolve this capacity issue.
Performance in Task Manager
The third and final tool for server maintenance is the Task Manager. It displays a wealth of information in a clear and organized manner, such as memory usage, processor load, and network speed. This makes it easy to see which software is putting a heavy load on your server. If you hear complaints from your employees about programs running slowly, check this tool. If you see one of the graphs sticking to the top of the chart, an upgrade to the machine may be necessary to keep things running smoothly.
To truly sleep soundly and enjoy a robust IT environment, there are a few other things you need to monitor on your servers. However, it’s best to leave those to professional system administrators. If you want to know what else you can do yourself to keep your IT infrastructure under control, check out some of our other blog posts. For example, you can read about allowing your employees to use personal devices in your small business, how to manage Windows and software updates yourself, or how to prevent email and Exchange issues.
If you have any questions about IT for small and medium-sized businesses, please feel free to contact us via our contact form. We're happy to help.
