Here are a few freely available tools
for startups to deal with some of
their challenges like ensuring 100%
service uptime, high availability and
performance of servers, among
other things
Almost 100 million new businesses are
launched every year, globally. As of
December 2015, India was ranked third in the
number of startups and is home to over 4,200
of them, according to a report published by NASSCOM.
With the relaxing of the startup regulations, you can
expect a spike in technology startups in India.
Some of the typical challenges these startups could
face include space, infrastructure, talent, and technology.
Fortunately, mobile and cloud technologies have
transformed the way businesses operate today. Now that
employees can work from the comfort of their homes
or on the move, startups can eliminate concerns such as
space, connectivity, and IT infrastructure. With mobility
influencing the IT landscape, it’s important that startups
and small businesses are able to manage IT from anywhere
Here are some of the IT challenges most startups
face depending on whether their IT infrastructure is on
the cloud or on-premise:
• 100% service uptime
• High availability and performance of servers
• Internet connectivity
• Mobility
Ensuring 100% service uptime
Startups and small enterprises rely on the availability of
their IT resources for business continuity. The first step in
resolving downtime is a basic ping check. Ping lets you
instantly determine whether a server is up or down and if
there is any packet loss, or if the response time is beyond
the acceptable limit
These metrics help determine the availability of a
device or a website. With a mobile ping tool, attending
to an unavailable server or a network is a breeze for
the IT admin on the move. The ping tool also allows for
first-level troubleshooting by enabling the admins trace
route to the websites or servers and perform a reverse
lookup to check if the DNS resolves.
Ensuring high availability and performance
of servers
The services hosted on the servers often choke up
resources and slow down the machines. Sometimes
services are unavailable because of insufficient
resources. Therefore, IT admins need to closely monitor
critical services, even when they are physically away
from these services.
In a larger environment, the app allows you to
create a list of critical servers to monitor so that you can
avoid wading through a huge list of servers. The app
automatically detects the services on the system and
monitors for availability. You can manage the services
and perform operations such as start, stop, or restart
a service. The app also lets you shut down or restart a
Windows system from wherever you are
Ensuring optimum Wi-Fi connectivity
Have you found yourself walking all over a conference
floor or trapped inside a meeting room in search
of a good Wi-Fi signal? It happens to the best of us.
Both end users and IT admins could use an app that
reports on the available Wi-Fi networks and their signal
strengths. Wi-Fi admins are often bombarded with
emails and calls from employees complaining about
poor connectivity. There are many Wi-Fi analyzer apps
that besides showing signal strength, provide insight
on channel overlaps as well. This insight will allow
admins to switch off channels to eliminate interference
or deploy additional access points or repeaters to
improve the reception.
Managing Cloud Infrastructure
For most startups or small businesses, hosting their
services in the cloud is a more viable option than
having to set up the required IT infrastructure onpremise.
The challenges with in-house hosting include
ensuring 100-percent uptime, sufficient bandwidth,
infrastructure redundancy, and the ability to allocate or
free up unused resources. Many businesses host their
services on Amazon EC2 instances. IT admins tasked
with monitoring their cloud instances would just need
the authentication parameters to be able to access
their cloud resources.
The cloud infrastructure management app enables
you to monitor the resources on your EC2 instances
from anywhere. With increasing enterprise apps, you
can connect to Amazon EC2 instances and monitor
live feed data, historical data, configured alarms, and
EBS volumes. Monitoring the performance metrics on
the EC2 instances lets you determine the health and
availability of these instances.
Troubleshooting SNMP
Startups that have on-premise infrastructure typically
deploy one of the several free monitoring solutions
to manage health, performance, and security of the
deployed IT infrastructure. Most of these servers,
applications, and network monitoring applications rely
on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to
manage the monitored devices. These solutions will fall
back on the native ping to determine the availability
and response time of the monitored devices. SNMP, CLI,
or WMI will be used to gather the performance metrics
of all other resources on the monitored devices.
We are living in a digital world which is majorly
driven by smartphones. There are various mobile apps
and free IT tools available in the market that will help
a start-up get to a next level. These free IT utilities will
enable admins with easy on-the-move IT management
with the required capabilities.
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