Need Help with Server Maintenance Best Practices

Windows Server General
#1

Hi everyone, :grinning:

I am relatively new to server management and would love some guidance on the best practices for server maintenance. I want to ensure our servers run smoothly and securely without causing too much downtime for our users.

What are the key steps you recommend for regular maintenance. How often should I perform tasks like updates backups and monitoring. Are there any tools or software that make these processes easier. Also any tips on troubleshooting common issues would be greatly appreciated
I also searched on this :point_right: https://www.cxtec.com/blog/top-5-server-maintenance-best-practices-sap-analytics/ but I could not found anything helpful for me.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Best,
[Roy]

#2

Hi @nancyr

Great question. I haven’t seen anything similar as well. Let me suggest something based on experience assuming you have less than a dozen Windows servers. I am leaving out Cloud or external resources since we can extend a lot more :sweat_smile:

System Updates and Patching: After each patch Tuesday test the updates on a couple of workstations or servers to ensure updates are OK. After a couple of weeks if there are no issues update the rest of the machines. A tool you can use is WSUS (Windows Server Update Services).

Backups: Backup the Servers and Data. Daily for critical data; weekly for less critical data. A tool you can use is Windows Server Backup.

Security: To perform a vulnerability scan you can use Nessus for less than 15 IP addresses. The idea is to run it once a month after applying your patches.

Monitoring: For server uptime, processes, and performance issues (disk, CPU, memory, process) you can use Nagios or Zabbix for network and server monitoring

Log management: Export the logs from Windows to Splunk or ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for log management checking things like when a user is added to an administrator group, account locks, user creation, etc.

-Ricardo