Finally, we were able to find an option that suits both of us and do what we can. In 2016, we decided to create an IT company that will help businesses solve IT problems. This is the deployment of IT systems (1C, terminal server, mail server, etc.), their maintenance, classic HelpDesk for users and network administration.
Frankly speaking, at the time of the company’s creation, I did not believe in it by about 99.9%. But somehow Pavel was able to get me to try, and looking ahead, he was right. We chipped in with Pavel for 300,000 rubles, registered a new Audit-Telecom LLC, rented a tiny office, made cool business cards, well, in general, like, probably, most inexperienced, novice businessmen and started looking for clients. Customer search is generally a separate story. Perhaps we will write a separate article as part of a corporate blog, if it will be interesting to someone. Cold calls, flyers, and so on. It didn’t give any results. As I’m already reading now, out of many business stories, one way or another a lot depends on luck. We were lucky. and just a couple of weeks after the establishment of the company, my brother Vladimir turned to us, who brought the first client to us. I will not bore you with the details of working with clients, the article is not about that, I will only say that we went to the audit, identified critical places and these places broke while the decision was being made whether to cooperate with us on a permanent basis as outsourcers. After that, a positive decision was immediately made.
Further, mainly through a sundress through friends, other companies began to appear on the service. Helpdesk was on the same system. Connections to network equipment and servers in another, or rather from whom as. Someone saved labels, someone used RDP address books. Monitoring is another separate system. It is very inconvenient for a team to work in disparate systems. Important information is lost sight of. Well, for example, the client’s terminal server became unavailable. Requests from users of this client are immediately received. The support service specialist starts the application (it was received by phone). If incidents and applications were registered in the same system, the support specialist would immediately see what the user’s problem was and tell him about it, simultaneously already connecting to the right object to work out the situation. Everyone is aware of the tactical situation and is working smoothly. We have not found a system where all this is combined. It became clear that it was time to make your own product.
Continuing to work on your monitoring system
It was clear that the system that was written earlier was completely unsuitable for current tasks. Neither in terms of functionality nor in terms of quality. And it was decided to write the system from scratch. Graphically, it should have already looked quite different. It had to be a hierarchical system so that it would be possible to quickly and conveniently open the right object from the right client. The scheme as in the first version was absolutely not justified in the current case, because the customers are different and it did not matter at all in which rooms the equipment is located. This has already been shifted to the documentation.
So, the tasks:
Hierarchical structure;
Some kind of server part that can be placed at the client in the form of a virtual machine to collect the metrics we need and send it to a central server that will summarize all this and show us;
Alerts. Those that cannot be missed, because at that time there was no opportunity for someone to sit and only look at the monitor;
Application system. Clients began to appear, from whom we serviced not only server and network equipment, but also workstations;
The ability to quickly connect to servers and equipment from the system;
The tasks are set, we begin to write. Simultaneously processing requests from clients. At that time there were already 4 of us. We started writing both parts at once, both the central server and the server for installation to clients. By this time, Linux was no longer a stranger to us and it was decided that the virtual machines that the clients would have would be on Debian. There won’t be any installers, we’ll just make a server-side project on one specific virtual machine, and then we’ll just clone it to the right client. It was another mistake. Later it became clear that the mechanism of updates was absolutely not worked out in such a scheme. That is, we added some new feature, and then there was a whole problem to distribute it to all client servers, but we will return to this later, everything in order.
That was at least something. Convenient address book. Moreover, in the case of Putty, everything was generally fine, it was possible to submit both IP connections and login and password as input parameters. I.e., we already connected to Linux servers in our network with one click without entering passwords. But with RDP, not everything is so simple. You cannot submit credentials as parameters to the standard mstsc. Remote Desktop Plus came to the rescue. He allowed it to be done. Now we are already doing without him, but for a long time he has been a faithful assistant in our system. With HTTP(S) sites, everything is simple, such objects just opened in the browser and that’s it. Convenient and practical. But it was happiness only in the internal network.