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ATG Active Assist

What is ATG Active Assist and what does it monitor?

ATG Active Assist provides 24/7 real-time monitoring of your servers; proactively monitoring, reporting back and sending alert notifications when necessary to ATG’s technical team.

This monitoring ensures your business will benefit from more stable servers which are the heart of your day-to-day IT reliability.

ATG Active Assist monitors a variety of services and applications on your server, including the following:

  • Windows Core Services: Each server is unique, so we tailor Active Assist to your specific requirements to ensure all core services are monitored. If a service should fail we are notified and our technical team will respond to the problem, often without you even being aware of an issue.

ATG Active Assist
  • Server Performance: We monitor each server for CPU, Memory and Disk Utilisation. We configure threshold alerts to notify us if drive space is becoming low or memory utilisation is becoming high. As a result we will act upon any alerts to ensure your server runs at optimum performance and any performance concerns don’t cause you issues when you work.
  • Exchange Monitors: Microsoft Exchange is the most popular email software and with emails being so vital to business, it is crucial that we can monitor this for you. With ATG Active Assist we monitor all the key Exchange services and email traffic, so if a service were to crash we will be notified and will get this up and running again as quickly as possible. We can also check the volume of email waiting to be sent to determine if there is an issue sending mail and monitor the size of your email database to ensure this doesn’t become too large and cause any issues.
  • Active Directory Monitors: We will monitor all Active Directory services to ensure there are no problems encountered when logging onto your server. If any of these services were to crash we will receive an alert notification which our engineers will act upon.
  • System Errors: We will monitor your server for ‘event errors’ such as a potential disk drive failure. This allows us to act quickly and before a problem becomes any worse. In addition to the core system event errors we monitor, these events can be modified to suit your business needs so that if an event occurs, for example an alert from a third-party software such as Sage, we will receive a notification alerts so that we can also monitor this for you.
  • Maintenance Tasks: With Active Assist, ATG can perform scheduled Windows maintenance tasks, such as disk cleanups and defragmentation’s out of office hours, this ensures your server is maintained to the best possible level, but with the minimum of disruption.
  • Windows Updates: Active Assist can check your servers against the Microsoft Windows updates database. This ensures any relevant updates can be applied and your server is maintained with up to date patches from Microsoft.

How does Active Assist work?

At the ATG office we have a server dedicated to Active Assist. All configurations for your server monitoring is managed from here. We install a small program on one of your servers which is then configured to talk back to the ATG Active Assist server. This software reports back periodically on the current health and efficiency of your server and sends out an alert notification if an error occurs.

Is it Secure?

All communication between your server and the ATG Active Assist server is encrypted and is sent on a non standard internet port to minimise the risk of interception. Because all activity is initiated by your server we do not need to open any ports on your firewall and therefore further reduce compromising your security.

What is the impact on Server Performance?

Further to extensive research, development and testing of this monitoring solution by ATG prior to our roll-out to existing support customers, we can confidently say that there will be negligible impact on your servers. The majority of processing is done via the Active Assist server at ATG.

How will I know the system is working?

On a day-to-day basis our technical team will be monitoring any alerts and reporting back to you where necessary on feedback or issues as and when they arise from the Active Assist monitoring.
We will also send you regular reports for your servers, illustrating how they have been performing and bringing any longer term concerns to your attention, i.e. disk space getting full. These will be sent monthly, but this can be modified to suit your requirements.


an atg managed IT contract brings a renewed confidence and peace of mind in your computer systems
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Tel +44 (0)1527 570535 | Fax +44 (0)1527 570355 | Email info@atg-it.co.uk