Most outages announce themselves for days. Somebody has to be listening.
Monitoring, alerting and reporting across servers, network, backups and cloud, so problems are found by an engineer at 2pm rather than by your staff at 9am.
Engineering offices in Egypt, delivering on site across Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and supporting clients remotely across the Gulf, Africa, Europe and the United States.
Most people call. It is faster, and you speak to an engineer, not a form.
What a free monitoring review looks at
Why monitoring fails to help
Usually not because there is no monitoring. Because of what happens, or does not. When it fires.
Alerts nobody reads
Hundreds of emails a week to a shared mailbox. Everyone assumes somebody else is watching, and the one alert that mattered is on page four.
Only the obvious things are watched
Servers are monitored, but not the UPS, the backup job, the certificate expiry or the internet link. The outage arrives from the direction nobody was facing.
No trend, only a moment
You can see that a disk is full. You cannot see that it has been filling at the same rate for six months, which is the information that would have prevented it.
Nothing you could hand to an auditor
The controls may be operating, but there is no record. On an audit or a client questionnaire, an unevidenced control is a failed one.
What we monitor, and what we do about it
Monitoring is only worth what the response behind it is worth. We set up both, and we report in language a non-technical board can read.
Coverage. Deciding what actually matters
Everything can be monitored. Monitoring everything produces noise, and noise gets ignored.
- Inventory of systems, ranked by what the business depends on
- Thresholds set from your real baselines, not vendor defaults
- Business-hours versus out-of-hours expectations agreed
- Escalation path with named people and a call order
- What is explicitly not monitored, written down
- Noise reduction so a real alert stands out
We would rather monitor thirty things well than three hundred badly.
Infrastructure, network and environment
The layer where most preventable outages begin.
- Servers, hosts, storage and virtualisation health
- Switches, firewalls, access points and link utilisation
- Internet circuits, latency and packet loss over time
- UPS status, battery health, temperature and humidity
- Certificate, licence and warranty expiry dates
- Capacity trends, so growth is planned rather than discovered
See Infrastructure Solutions for the underlying build.
Backups, cloud and identity
The three areas where failure is quietest and the consequences are largest.
- Backup job success, duration and repository capacity
- Restore tests recorded as evidence, not just run
- Microsoft 365 service health, licensing and mailbox growth
- Cloud spend and unused resources flagged monthly
- Failed logins, impossible travel and new admin accounts
- New mailbox forwarding rules, the classic compromise signal
Ties into Backup & Data Protection.
Auditing and evidence
The part that turns monitoring into something you can show somebody.
- Log collection and retention set to your obligations
- Change history, so you know what was altered and by whom
- Access reviews produced on a schedule, with sign-off
- Patch compliance reported per device, not per estate
- Evidence packs mapped to ISO 27001 and client questionnaires
- Findings raised as actions with an owner and a date
Feeds directly into Information Security Management.
Reporting people actually read
A monthly page that a non-technical director can act on, not a dashboard nobody opens.
- Monthly report: uptime, incidents, backups, patching, risks
- Plain-English summary at the top, detail underneath
- Trends shown over months, not a snapshot
- The three things we recommend doing next, prioritised
- Review call so the report is discussed, not just delivered
- Board-ready format when you need to justify budget
The report exists to drive decisions. If it does not, we change it.
Environments we monitor
Real Stark work. Client identifiers are withheld under confidentiality. Sector and scope only.
National e-payment platform
Monitored around the clock, where minutes of unnoticed degradation are a public problem rather than an internal one.
National data centre
Infrastructure, power and environmental monitoring built into the programme rather than added after the first incident.
Estate-wide visibility
One view across sites so a branch problem is seen centrally instead of being reported by the branch when it is already an outage.
Evidence for audit
Access reviews, patch compliance and backup restore records produced on a schedule and handed over as an evidence pack.
References can be provided directly, on request, with the client’s agreement.
Three things we will tell you not to do
The questions we get asked most
Do you monitor around the clock?
We do for clients where that is agreed and specified, including live payment platforms. It is a commercial decision as much as a technical one, so we scope it against what an hour of downtime actually costs you rather than selling 24/7 by default.
Can you monitor systems you did not install?
Yes, and most of what we monitor we did not build. We start by documenting the estate, because you cannot monitor what nobody has written down.
What is the difference between monitoring and auditing here?
Monitoring tells you the state of things now and warns you when it changes. Auditing produces the record that proves a control has been operating over time, which is what an ISO auditor or an enterprise client asks for. Most clients need both, and they share the same data.
Will this replace our IT team?
No, and we would not propose it as that. Monitoring gives an internal team early warning and removes the guesswork; it does not replace judgement. Where there is no internal team, it usually sits inside a managed agreement instead.
How quickly would you know if our backups stopped working?
The same day, because backup jobs are monitored as first-class systems rather than assumed. The more important question is whether the backups can actually be restored, which is a scheduled test with a written result rather than a green tick.
What would you find out first. You, or your customers?
Ten minutes on the phone is usually enough to tell you where the blind spots are and which one is worth closing first.
Sunday to Thursday, 9am to 6pm · Egypt, and remote worldwide
Our other IT services
Every service below is delivered by the same team, under the same agreement.