The first sign of an internet outage is often a phone call from a frustrated nurse or front desk employee. By then, the problem has already been affecting work for several minutes, and your IT person or provider starts the day behind. Simple monitoring flips that around: an automatic alert tells you something is wrong, sometimes before anyone notices.
Uptime monitoring sounds technical, but at its simplest it means something automatically checks whether key services are available and tells a person if they are not. You do not need a large budget or a dedicated IT department to do it.
Start with the services your organization cannot function without. For a healthcare or senior-living operation, that might include:
Internet connection. Is each building online? If you have a backup connection, is it healthy?
Email. Can people send and receive messages?
Electronic health record. Is your cloud-based system, such as PointClickCare, reachable from your buildings? Your vendor typically publishes a status page worth bookmarking.
Phone system. Particularly if it is cloud-based or depends on internet service.
Website and patient or family portals. Public sites that families, referral partners and job applicants visit.
VPN and remote access. The tools staff use from home or from other sites.
Key servers and network devices. Firewalls, switches, wireless controllers and on-premises servers.
Backups. Did last night's backup finish?
Security certificates and domain renewals. An expired certificate can take a website offline.
A ping check tests whether a device or address responds. It is a quick way to see if a firewall, switch or server is up. It does not prove that applications on that device work, but it is a good first alarm.
A web check loads a page, such as your website or a login page, and confirms it responds correctly. A port check confirms a specific service, like secure web traffic or mail, is accepting connections.
Some jobs, like backups, should report in on schedule. A heartbeat check expects a signal at a set time, and raises an alert if the signal does not arrive. This detects problems that would otherwise go unnoticed until someone needs a backup.
A monitor running inside your own network will not notice if your internet connection is down, since it cannot send you a message. Use at least one monitor that runs from outside, such as a cloud-based service, so it can detect when your site or connection disappears.
Options range from free or low-cost services to full monitoring platforms. A small organization can often start with a hosted monitoring service that checks addresses every few minutes and sends email, text or app alerts. Managed IT providers usually include monitoring as part of their service. When comparing options, ask:
Can it check from outside our network?
Can alerts reach the right person at any hour?
Does it support the types of checks we need?
Does it keep a history so we can see how often problems occur?
Is it easy enough that more than one person can manage it?
Too many alerts cause people to ignore them. Too few mean you miss real problems.
Decide who is notified, and have a backup person if the first does not respond.
Require a few failed checks in a row before alerting, to avoid false alarms from brief blips.
Separate urgent from informational. A down internet connection at a nursing facility is urgent; a slightly slow website may not be.
Write a short note for each alert describing what it means and what to check first.
Test the alerts by deliberately triggering one, so you know the message arrives.
The records from monitoring are valuable. If a connection drops briefly every Tuesday afternoon, that pattern may point to a failing device or a provider issue. If you need to raise a complaint with your internet provider, a log of outages with times is far more persuasive than memory. Review the history monthly or quarterly.
Knowing about an outage is only half the job. Decide in advance what to do: who calls the internet provider, how staff are told, how care continues if the electronic record is unavailable and when to switch to a backup connection. Keep downtime procedures, including paper forms, available offline.
Begin with five or six checks on the most critical services, confirm that alerts reach a real person and expand slowly. UnityCare IT provides monitoring as part of managed services for healthcare organizations, and can help smaller teams set up a simple version themselves, so a problem is on someone's radar before the phones start ringing.
Microsoft 365, cloud storage and tested backups with access controls built in.
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