Back even a year ago, servers came with either Silver or Gold support.

Does anyone know if servers come with anything other than "free ping monitoring" these days?

So far, my ticket has been sent to every department and I have not received a strait answer as to why only ping is included these days or if I do have the ability to add a "few" monitors without charge.
With Gold services, a customer could at least monitor CPU, RAM, two HDD's, TCP custom port, and 6 services + processes.

My server I just replaced (dual xeon 2.8-) had gold support.
With my new server (dual xeon 3.4 with larger HDD, etc.) it seems I have nothing even though I thought all servers came with at least silver support (for low end). A $400+ server isn't low end to me.

Just wondering.

The silver/gold/etc plans were done away with in January of 2007. If you still have a server that was originally purchased with one of these legacy plans, then you still get the benefits of them.

Anything purchased after, you'll want to check out the following link or chat with one of the sales people:
http://www.theplanet.com/dedicated-servers...ces/#monitoring

Quick and simple answer from the forums.
Thanks Tomy.

The welcome e-mails still show the platinum/titanium support info though.

"Alpha Server Monitoring is only available for Linux / BSD servers."
http://www.theplanet.com/dedicated-servers...ces/#monitoring

The legacy support plans went away, for new orders, when the DC Ops of 'the planet' quit doing tech support and the 'ev1' tech support team took over for both sides. I was a technician back then, so I still remember it. The legacy plan verbiage shouldn't show up in new orders, but it will show up in OS reload tickets which have the plan.

For the most part, today's monitoring is broken up into two categories. The first will result in emails and notifications being sent to you, but not to our technicians.

The second will result in an 'alert' being displayed to the technician who's handling monitoring(currently they sit in Dllstx6(Dallas) and Hsntx1/2(Houston)). Once this happens, the technician doing monitoring will pop a ticket and send it to the data center where your server is located. Then a technician in the data center will then review your escalation procedures and execute them, provided they fall within the scope of support included with the server.

Why is monitoring only available for Linux these days?

How do we know what we are allowed to list in a servers escalation procedures?
If something isn't within the "basic" scope, will the whole thing be ignored if there are not any guidelines?

Below is the e-mail I received with my newest server addition a few weeks ago:

Your server is online and available for access at the following location:
Server Name: ********
Server IP: *************
Netmask: **************
Gateway: *************
Secondary IPs: **********

SERVICES

You may remotely administrate your server using OpenSSH [ http://www.openssh.com ] or most other SSH Clients.

The following services have been installed on your server:
* OpenSSH
* Apache (not configured)
* Perl
* Mod_perl
* Mod_ssl

NAMESERVERS

If you are using another registrar but want to use our nameservers, please use:
- [ns2.theplanet.com]
- [ns1.theplanet.com]

If you are using The Planet as your domain registrar and nameserver (new domains only), please use:
- [ns1.theplanetdomains.com]
- [ns2.theplanetdomains.com]


PASSWORDS

To retrieve your username and password in Orbit:
1) Go to [https://orbit.theplanet.com].
2) Under HARDWARE, click SERVER PASSWORDS.
3) Find your server's system password entry in the list, then click it's Username link to view your server's system password.


MONITORING SERVICES

By default, we will set up Ping monitors for your server; however, you can adjust that or add to it as needed. To add additional monitoring services, please log into Orbit and click on the Monitoring IP Alert link under the Hardware tab. There you will find a link to the "Professional Services Monitoring Request Form".

Or use this link directly: https://orbit.theplanet.com/nav_services/mo...p;acctid=C25173


FIREWALLS AND ACCESS

If you set access control limits or other rules, such as IPtables, ZoneAlarm or other firewalls on your server (including Windows 2003 SP1 internal firewall), please configure them to allow inbound and outbound traffic on all ports (TCP & UDP 1-65535) from:

***this is where a list of ThePlanet IP's go; didn't want to include these to public view***

If access is blocked by your server or firewall, we will not be able to monitor your server to report downtime or provide emergency support as needed.


VALUE-ADDED AND ADDITIONAL SERVICES <----- which one; confusing

Every Platinum and Titanium solution offered by The Planet includes the following services:

* Professional Services
- Server Anti-Virus Protection
- Penetration Testing
- O/S Hardening Services
- Services Monitoring
-- Platinum Service Level, up to 9
-- Titanium Service Level, up to 12
- FTP
- SSH
- HTTPA
- Terminal Services
- Etc.
- Systems Monitoring
-- Platinum Service Level, up to 9
-- Titanium Service Level, up to 12
- Drive Space
- Processor Usage
- Server Load
- Etc.
- Process Monitoring
-- Platinum Service Level, up to 9
-- Titanium Service Level, up to 12
- ColdFusion.exe
- PGP.exe
- ApacheGuard.sh
- Snort
- Etc.
- Systems Administration Services:
-- Platinum Service Level, 4 hours per month
-- Titanium Service Level, 6 hours per month


* Database Administration
The Planet can provide you with Certified Oracle and SQL DBAs for large projects for limited periods of time. Please contact The Planet for details.


CONTACTING THE PLANET

You can contact The Planet through Orbit at [https://orbit.theplanet.com] using the link to CONTACT US or CREATE CUSTOMER TICKET if you need anything else.

Thank you,
The Planet Install Engineer

BTW - I received that same format e-mail back in the days of Server Matrix.
It says "WELCOME TO SERVER MATRIX" in the top of the e-mail with the same content.

DCOps still monitors windows servers, the Advanced Services team doesn't yet.

If something falls outside of scope, they'll usually tell you in a ticket and try to contact you.

Things we see in escalations that we wont do:
* Delete logs or any files
* Reconfigure services (outside of SSH or RDC)
* Raise software firewalls or reconfigure software firewalls (we will drop them upon request)
* Development
* Backups or Restores
* Investigation into why certain services/processes aren't running efficiently due to configurations
* Ignore alerts

The safe escalation procedures:
* Reboots
* Checking console
* Restarting services
* Escalating latency
* Hardware swaps if the server cant be brought up
* Reconfiguring SSH or RDC if they go down.
* Call me's, Email me's, just create tickets(upon creation, the alert will be "acknowledged")

For the most part, if escalations aren't defined, someone will call you.

About two or three months ago, we quit honoring the request to ignore alerts. Our technicians would literally have 20-40 alerts where customers requested them to be ignored which resulted in alot of problems. Now, we'll create a ticket and then ACK(Acknowledge) the alert or ask the customer if they'd like to have the alert removed.

Thanks for the list.
My procedures have never gone outside the scope but I wasn't sure since my older servers were legacy servers and things are much different than the new servers (it seems).

"Delete logs or any files" = I find that request to be funny since it is the server administrators job.