"By far, most of my time as an IT engineer is spent monitoring and maintaining the information technology infrastructure, which includes the hardware, network, operating systems, and applications. Maintaining system uptime and making sure all the resources are available to the business users is the definition of my job. I do this in several ways. My preferred monitoring tool is the SolarWinds server and application monitoring suite. This provides me a unified dashboard of all the systems and processes. I can set parameters for performance that will generate alarms when the systems fall above or below the guidelines. I also perform regular maintenance on the systems even if they are within compliance to prevent future problems. These tasks range from simply cleaning the systems to running stress tests to make sure they will handle peak user loads. Taken together, the strategy has resulted in a 99.999% uptime for the information technology systems I managed for my previous employers."
