REMOTE MONITORING

24x7x365 remote monitoring is a proven way for organisations to minimise downtime by addressing potential issues before they arise. By automating alerts for a range of predefined events, human resource can be deployed as efficiently as possible while maintaining outstanding levels of performance.

The results speak for themselves: over the last twelve months, more than 85% of tickets raised in the Block Operations Centre were raised by our monitoring platform, allowing our team to resolve issues for customers before users experience any drop in service.

The Block monitoring platform, BLOCKalert, utilises Solarwinds Orion architecture to provide immediate alerts whenever an issue arises. The model requires a distributed deployment made up of a central Enterprise Operations Console (EOC) for management and a satellite Orion server deployed at the client site.

Customers can choose BLOCKalert to underpin any of our Managed Service or Support packages depending on requirement.

The platform raises alerts for the Block Operations Centre (BOC) team to address a broad range of events and issues:

• The system actively polls devices on the client network and alerts in real time when a router or switch is down
• Passive monitors receive SNMP traps and log messages from the network devices alerting on issues as they occur
• Threshold monitors alert when critical interfaces (inter-switch links) reach bandwidth, error or latency thresholds
• A network performance monitor tracks the health of the network infrastructure. CPU and critical interface bandwidth monitoring enable proactive troubleshooting and planning
• Our VoIP monitor accesses information generated by network devices to monitor parameters essential to VoIP performance. Jitter, latency and packet loss from both source and destination are used to provide the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a measure of voice quality.

In addition to the standard BLOCKalert Solarwinds service, Block offers further enhanced network services:

• Software scan: A Cisco approved tool is used to perform checks for IOS bugs, security threats and defects. Results from the scan are used to advise customers on all software update recommendations.
• Configuration Backups: Provides peace of mind that all network device configurations are securely backed up and ready for deployment