Overview
Most outages start small: a job waiting on a message, a filesystem slowly filling up, a backup that failed last night. Caught early, each takes minutes to fix. Missed, it becomes a morning of downtime.
The VSR Tech Network Operations Centre (NOC) watches your systems every minute of every day. Our operators know IBM i and AIX, act on alerts using runbooks agreed with you, and bring in L2 and L3 engineers the moment something needs deeper skills.
What we monitor
| Area | What we watch |
|---|---|
| IBM i | QSYSOPR messages, jobs in MSGW, subsystems, job queues, batch schedules, ASP usage, CPU and response time |
| AIX | errpt, filesystems, paging space, CPU and memory, processes, PowerHA cluster state |
| PowerVM and HMC | VIOS health, storage paths, hardware and serviceable events |
| Backups | BRMS and mksysb results, tape and media status, replication lag |
| Applications | Key business jobs, interfaces, ports and URLs you define |
| Infrastructure | Linux and Windows servers, network devices and databases connected to your Power estate |
How an alert is handled
- Detect. The monitoring tool raises an alert, or a user reports a problem.
- Acknowledge. A NOC operator picks it up and opens a ticket.
- Act. The operator follows the agreed runbook, for example replying to a routine message or restarting an approved job.
- Escalate. If the runbook does not resolve it, the right L2 or L3 engineer is called in, along with your on-call contact for critical issues.
- Close and learn. The ticket records what happened and what fixed it, and repeat issues go into the monthly problem review.
What is included
- 24x7x365 monitoring by trained operators
- Runbooks written and agreed with you during onboarding
- Ticket logging in your ITSM tool or ours
- Escalation matrix with named contacts and response times
- Shift handover notes, so nothing is lost between shifts
- Daily summary of incidents and open items
- Monthly service report with availability, incident trends and recommendations
Tools
We can work with the monitoring and ticketing tools you already have, or provide our own. Typical tools include Zabbix, Nagios, SolarWinds and IBM Navigator for i for monitoring, and ServiceNow, Jira Service Management or TOPdesk for ticketing. Custom checks cover the IBM i and AIX details that general tools miss.
Onboarding
- Discover. We list every system, job and interface to monitor, and agree priorities.
- Configure. We set up monitoring, thresholds and alert routing.
- Document. We write runbooks and the escalation matrix with your team.
- Go live. We run in parallel with your current process, then take over fully.
Frequently asked questions
Can your NOC fix problems or only report them?
Both. Operators fix routine issues using approved runbooks and pass everything else to our IBM i and AIX engineers straight away.
Do we need to buy monitoring tools?
No. We can use your existing tools or set up monitoring for you.
How do you report on the service?
You get a daily summary and a monthly service report, and you can see every ticket in real time in the ticketing tool.