Most IT outages are not caused by rare disasters. They come from small issues that build up unnoticed: a full disk, a failed backup job nobody checked, an expired certificate. A regular infrastructure health check finds these risks before they turn into downtime.
Here are the 12 areas we review first when we assess a new environment.
Servers and platforms
- Capacity: CPU, memory and disk trends on every server and virtual host, not just current usage.
- Operating system support: any servers running Windows Server or Linux versions that are out of vendor support.
- Virtualisation health: VMware or Hyper-V cluster warnings, old snapshots and over-committed hosts.
- Certificates: SSL and internal certificates that will expire in the next 90 days.
Data protection
- Backup success: the real success rate of backup jobs over the last 30 days.
- Restore testing: when a restore was last tested, and whether it worked.
- Offsite and immutable copies: at least one copy that ransomware cannot encrypt or delete.
- Database protection: transaction log backups and recovery points for Oracle, SQL Server or MySQL databases.
Security and operations
- Patching: how many critical patches are outstanding, and for how long.
- Privileged access: who holds administrator rights, and whether multi-factor authentication is enforced.
- Monitoring and alerting: whether alerts reach someone who acts on them, at any hour.
- Documentation: an up-to-date network diagram, asset list and recovery procedures.
Turning findings into action
A health check is only useful if it ends in a clear plan. Rate each finding by risk and effort, fix the quick wins first, and schedule larger items such as upgrades or a DR design into a 90-day roadmap.
InfraWorks offers infrastructure health checks as a standalone service and as part of our managed IT infrastructure services. Book a free consultation to discuss yours.