What is on your periodic system maintenance? (Windows)

I'm looking at creating a schedule and list of periodic maintenance for our Windows servers (2k3, 2k8). Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas of things that should be implemented. Bonus points for Citrix tasks that should be done.


I'm not a big fan of periodic maintenance. I think you should be monitoring your servers on a continuous basis and responding to problems immediately. I use home brewed monitoring (just some VBScripts using WMI) but there are lots of server monitoring apps out there. The things I look for on a daily basis are:

  • did the backup work
  • how much free disk space
  • is the AV up to date
  • list event log entries of type "Error"
  • list all Dell ESM log entries of type "Error"

It's a bit more involved than that, for example there are some non-error eventlog entries I check for, e.g. the Eventlog entry indicating a restart. Also I linear regress the free disk space to warn me if the disk space will fall to zero in the next six months.

JR


Have you experimented with some of the adminstrator stuff? You can create your own MMC tools for monitoring disk space, Temperatures, network usage - gosh, I can't even remember the ridiculous ammount of tools that's inbuilt in windows.

There's a good guide here on creating your own MMC:

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/15134/how-do-i-create-a-custom-mmc-configuration.html

Good Luck :)