Server Maintenance
What is involved in Server Maintenance?
Just like your car, your servers need maintenance on them as well. Unlike your car though, servers rarely get turned off. They are always in a go-state. They are always in a change of state because something is always happening that they have to be monitoring and attending to. Files are always being changed, added or deleted by generally more than one person at a time. There are always background processes running that need monitoring and attention to by the server. And someone has to make sure that the server is not breaking down under the strain of all this activity.
What does it look like when a server dies? Unlike a car that will make noises and then just stop moving, servers are a little more subtle in the way they breakdown. There is no squeaky fan belt to go, no radiator cap to blow up or tire to go flat. Generally the server starts to operate a little slower all the time. But since you are working on the machine all the time, this does not become immediately apparent to you. Then it starts to have network problems, packets get dropped, collisions between messages on the network start happening more and more, files get corrupted for no apparent reason. And if you are not monitoring all this behaviour, then you are going to be in for a rude shock when it suddenly does come to a sudden and abrupt halt, like your car exploding on the highway.
But there is no reason why you can't be pro-active and look for the symptoms ahead of time and avert the problems. There are always symptoms that you can be looking for in a server that will alert you to possible problems. The speed of the system is a fairly obvious one. But someone has to monitor it.
Alert logs play another integral part in the health of your server. They can alert you to potential problems. Problems like server overload - too many people on too small a machine. Network problems will also show up in the log files as the number of attempts that need to be made in order to fulfill a connection request change.
Want More Information? Please contact us: Ask for more Info