What is Remote Monitoring?

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SOTEC Remote Monitoring (SRM) is a software solution that enables businesses to deliver remote IT monitoring, security and remediation to their IT landscape. Delivered as a hosted service, SRM monitors virtually any device and many popular applications, tracks and trends on performance, alerts you to potential IT issues, helps you resolve them through several remediation capabilities, and generates customer-facing reports that illustrate the value of your service.

Multi-tenant Monitoring and Performance

Monitor and manage all customers in one glance.

Reducing your labor costs to deliver remote managed services will help to increase your margins. These features are designed to reduce your labor costs.

• Multi-tenant monitoring – Securely support multiple customers and sites from one system.
• Access control, delegation and privileges – Precise controls allow you to define roles and responsibilities for your staff and your end users.
• Notifications – Generate and transmit alerts by email, pager or email-enabled cell phones when a critical event occurs in your customers’ environment. The notification format is customizable to easily integrate with other applications.
• Policy-based provisioning – Define your monitoring policies once and assign them to devices in seconds. About 2,000 default policy monitoring components are included to speed deployment and deliver industry best practices.
• Easy-to-use user interface – Intuitive graphical interface allows faster ramp up of new employees by reducing the learning curve. Tabbed info pages consolidate information from multiple sources into one comprehensive view.
• Integrated, customizable knowledge base – Hotlink your alerts to best practices for resolution, enabling entry-level staff to perform remediation.
• Interactive HTML documentation – The new feature rich online help system allows system users to quickly access information. The context sensitive, searchable system displays additional help within topics, and guided navigation empowers system users to complete complex tasks with ease.
• Performance – Store, trend and report on dozens of performance statistics such as CPU, memory, disk and interface utilization. Generate alerts on threshold violations, with automatic clearing capabilities.
• Vulnerability scanning – Scan and report on over 2,000 vulnerabilities across hardware and software configurations. Schedule scans to run at any time, and view details of any scheduled scan in the Scheduled Tasks Report.
• Patch management – Scan for missing patches and deploy updates to one or multiple Windows devices, per customer or per device.
• Intrusion monitoring – Monitor login/logout activity by user/device, failed login details, and account modification activity.
• Firewall monitoring – Monitor and report on firewall performance, configuration changes, VPN issues, and DoS attacks.
• Asset management – View a detailed inventory of software and hardware on devices, including editable manufacturer, model, and serial number.
• Scheduled rediscoveries – Schedule one-time or recurring asset rediscoveries to view software and hardware changes on existing devices.
• Local credentials – Encrypt, manage and store all types of SRM login credentials on your local SilverStreaks instead of on the application servers for added security.
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) – Monitor CUCM versions 5.1 and 6.0 events, services and performance data with one management tool.

Automatic Remote Remediation to Reduce Operating Costs

Schedule and deploy patches to one or multiple devices, or target groups for faster, simpler deployments.

The SRM Remediation Package extends product functionality beyond monitoring and performance to give you complete remote control over the lifecycle and management of devices and applications. By resolving alerts remotely, you can eliminate the need for a substantial proportion of onsite visits, and you can automate many tedious, manual, error-prone processes.

The SRM Remediation Package contains the following:

• Patch deployment – Schedule and deploy patches to Windows servers and desktops.
• With inclusion/exclusion filters you can precisely define the types of patches to deploy.
• You can configure patch rollback rules to remove previously deployed patches that may be causing problems.
• You control post-install system reboots to minimize disruption.
• Multi-tiered deployment reduces network bandwidth required to download and install patches.
• Over 400 products and versions are covered, including Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Outlook, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Macromedia Flash, Apache and more.
• Remote control – Take control of your customers' systems using a VNC-based desktop sharing system, which does not require the use of a VPN. Or open any TCP port across the VPN-free SilverStreak connection to use Telnet, SSH, or Microsoft Terminal Services.
• Automatic remote task execution – Execute remote commands, including scripts, on an automatic, instant, scheduled or recurring basis across a single or many devices. Automated execution eliminates missed tasks and provides 24x7 remediation on Windows and Linux.
• File transfer – Upload and download files to and from remote Windows devices without the need for a VPN.
• VPN-less deployment – Avoid the need to deploy VPNs or reconfigure firewalls to set up, monitor and remotely manage your customers.
• Agent-less architecture – Eliminate the time-consuming tasks of deploying, installing, configuring and maintaining hardware/software probes and agents.

SilverStreak and Deployment Architecture

Demonstrate Business Value with Comprehensive Reports

SRM provides a full complement of highly readable, graphics-rich reports.

SRM provides an integrated, realtime dashboard view of your IT environments, with a full complement of reports. These highly readable, graphics-rich reports can be automatically generated and emailed, either scheduled or on-demand. SilverMine Reports are integrated into SRM and accessible from the user interface without the need for data replication through an external database.

• Automated report distribution – Automatically email scheduled reports to your staff and customers as soon as they are available. Multiple reports can be sent individually or bundled together in a single email report package.
• In-depth monthly service report – This multi-page report provides comprehensive insight into service delivery over a monthly period. It comprises virtually every aspect of delivery, including assets, alerts, performance, security and remediation activities.
• Two-page customer scorecard – These two-page summary reports can be run on a weekly or monthly basis and automatically emailed to clients. They provide a high-level snapshot of every aspect of service, from asset inventory to resolved faults. VPN-free SilverStreak connection to use Telnet, SSH, or Microsoft Terminal Services.
• Drill-down reports – Twenty-one separate reports dive into the details of a particular aspect of services, such as detailed asset lists, particular performance metrics, and detailed fault activity.
• Proof of concept report – Evaluation customers can see their own real data rolled up into a daily report.

Technical Specifications

Device and Technology Support

Hosted Solution Benefits

The hosted SRM platform provides a low cost alternative to a software product for delivering managed services. SOTEC provides the complete environment for the solution and maintains it over time, with the following benefits:

• You don't need to provide rack space, power, or cooling.
• You don't need to perform backups or provide backup storage.
• You don't need to do system or software maintenance.
• There's a complete high-availability environment managed by SOTEC.
• The hosted environment is highly secure with high performance network feeds.

Customer Support

SOTEC monitors your platform 24x7 with our own managed services technology so we are automatically alerted to potential problems. Many issues can be corrected by our customer support staff without you even noticing a problem. We electronically update you with patches, upgrades and new features, to free your IT staff from hardware and software maintenance activities.