To learn more, we spoke to Laurence Fenton, one of our Senior Technical Support Engineers. Laurence has built extensive knowledge of cloud hosting systems and infrastructure management, through a decade of experience in the field, including four years in the technical support team at Hyve. Proactively monitoring customer infrastructure is a central part of his role.
Laurence’s insights explore how our engineers keep your infrastructure running smoothly 24/7/365, going above and beyond standard infrastructure monitoring, and the benefits this brings to your business.
Why does proactive infrastructure monitoring matter?
Proactive monitoring means staying one step ahead of potential issues to keep systems available and reliable. Unlike standard monitoring, which typically only alerts you after a problem has occurred, proactive monitoring continuously analyses your infrastructure for early warning signs of failures, performance degradation, or security vulnerabilities.
Laurence explains that at Hyve: “We provide proactive infrastructure monitoring for customers to give a better peace of mind. Customers expect the highest uptime, which requires a complex series of sensors and monitoring systems to alert our technical team to any problems, usually before they have an impact.”
This early detection allows our engineers to act quickly, often preventing downtime altogether. By identifying potential issues before they escalate, proactive monitoring safeguards availability, helps maintain optimal system performance, improves overall efficiency, and reduces operational costs by avoiding emergency fixes. Additionally, it strengthens security by spotting unusual activity or vulnerabilities early, allowing for timely intervention before they can be exploited.
What does infrastructure monitoring cover?
Our monitoring covers multiple layers of your infrastructure, from the operating system (OS) and applications to the hardware and network components. We continuously monitor servers, storage, and critical system processes, preventing issues before they occur, ensuring your infrastructure remains secure, reliable, and highly available.
Laurence says: “We have checks for everything important within the server’s OS, as well as any additional customized checks such as service monitoring for SFTP or website availability. In addition to this we also monitor the stack the server lies on, the network connectivity, and the hardware itself.”
Our dedicated engineers use advanced tools including Zabbix and Graphite, alongside custom solutions developed by our DevOps team, to ensure all critical components are covered.
How monitoring identifies and resolves issues quickly
Our proactive monitoring systems are designed to detect and flag unusual activity immediately, altering our 24/7/365 support team. Once alerted, our engineers investigate the root cause, plan the resolutions, and implement the fix as quickly as possible. This ensures potential issues are addressed before they escalate, helping to minimize disruption and downtime.
Automation also plays a part – Laurence noted: “In some cases where there is a simple fix, such as a service has crashed or hung, we can automate a simple service restart. We will be alerted to the event where we can then monitor the situation.”
Every second of downtime can affect your business’s performance, making proactive and fast-acting support critical. To learn more, read our insight on Minimizing downtime through fast and effective support.
Disaster Recovery (DR) as an extra layer of protection
Even the most robust hardware can fail, which is why redundancy and failover planning are key to our approach. On top of proactive monitoring, Disaster Recovery (DR) provides an additional layer of protection, ensuring that in the event of a major issue, services can be failed over to a secondary site to maintain availability.
Laurence explains: “In a scenario where we have faced a possible APD (All Paths Down) problem, we will have automated a failover to a secondary DR (Disaster Recovery) site. Our support team will be notified of a failed component and of the initiated failover. We will then proceed to plan replacement of parts and schedule a failback to primary systems with minimum risk to customer availability.”
The exact process depends on the solution in place, as your environment is tailored to your specific requirements. For some, failover may be monitored and initiated by default, whilst for others, DR may act as an additional safeguard which can be activated when needed (generally customers with a private cloud solution).
What remains consistent is that DR complements proactive monitoring, providing a critical safety net in the event of an unexpected hardware or system failure, and ensuring that your infrastructure is designed with resilience in mind.
How monitoring supports security
Proactive monitoring is also an important part of maintaining strong security. At Hyve, we monitor for vulnerabilities and keep systems patched, both manually during maintenance windows and through automated processes. Catching and addressing these vulnerabilities, and any weaknesses where vulnerabilities could develop if not addressed, prevents malicious actors from accessing your systems and data.
Laurence explains: “We are consistently looking out for new vulnerabilities on our various systems. We have policies to patch all OS’s and infrastructure frequently. Some of our systems are manually updated during maintenance windows, a lot of systems will be automated and monitored. This helps our infrastructure to remain up-to-date and secure against any recent threats.”
How monitoring addresses common infrastructure-management mistakes
For businesses managing their own systems, Laurence has seen the same avoidable mistakes:
- Shared admin accounts
- Not enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Exposing critical services to the public internet
These mistakes lead to weaknesses in your infrastructure, which can be exploited by malicious actors.
Monitoring can help address these weaknesses. Laurence notes: “Whether it’s altering admins to non-expiring passwords (Microsoft LAPS is a useful tool to cycle admin passwords) or using NG-SIEM to monitor suspected malicious login attempts, the tools are out there – it’s usually IT teams that are simply not aware they exist.”
The benefits of using a managed service provider for proactive monitoring
While it is possible to manage monitoring in-house, there are clear advantages to using a managed service provider (MSP). Building and maintaining an in-house team requires significant investment in recruitment, training, and ongoing operational costs. Despite these efforts, many organisations are impacted by the IT and tech skills gap, limiting access to the specialist expertise required to manage these complex environments.
An MSP alleviates these challenges by providing 24/7/365 access to highly skilled professionals who use advanced monitoring tools. This optimizes costs, creates faster response times, and guarantees proactive protection which would be more difficult and expensive to manage in-house.
Laurence explains: “Hyve have all the systems in place, the support, and the knowledge behind us to act quickly while we monitor our customers’ systems. We take the weight off, allowing them to focus on running their business.”
The next steps
Proactive monitoring is essential to keeping systems reliable, secure, and available. At Hyve, we take a consultative approach, getting to know your specific requirements. Our engineers then build an ongoing bespoke monitoring strategy around your needs. We offer multiple levels of monitoring and alerts, to ensure your infrastructure is always kept safe, and running at optimal performance, with zero downtime.
For an initial consultation, fill out our contact form and we will be in touch.