Something as simple as a full hard drive can cause Windows to stop running. Insufficient memory can do the same, locking up your computer and causing you to lose your unsaved changes. And we all know someone who’s had a hard drive crash and lost all their important data. When these issues happen on a server, everyone in the office shares the pain.

Your IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) should be monitoring all of these conditions and more. At the first sign that things are going awry they can notify you and provide recommendations. Monitoring the health of your network is one of the IT Managed Services offered by a Managed Service Provider.

Along these lines, occasionally there are minor software glitches (sorry for the technical jargon). A server might have a hundred programs (known as services) running at any given time. For whatever reason, occasionally one may stop. It might be the one that prevents you from logging on, or printing, or opening files, or connecting to the internet, or any of a number of things you do during the day. A managed service provider who is proactively monitoring your server will notice this and restart the program immediately. They will further investigate why it stopped and remediate the problem. All of this can happen before you ever notice there was a problem. Without managed hardware and performance monitoring, you’ll have to first notice something not working, then call your IT guy and wait for him to show up and fix it.

This is one of the best arguments for having true IT Managed Services. An hour or two of server downtime can cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity and possibly lost customers. But not all Managed Service Providers offer this level of service. So ask yours if they offer 24×7 monitoring and remediation of critical services.