Spanish shipbuilder Navantia recently made headlines with a 75-meter drone warship that operates entirely without a crew. It’s a marvel of engineering: sensors, modular payloads, and remote operation replacing the need for sailors on deck.
In the IT world, we should be taking notes.
While the defense industry is automating naval fleets, too many IT departments and MSPs are still operating like 19th-century navies. When a server goes down or a Windows endpoint throws a critical error, the standard operating procedure involves sending a "sailor"—a technician—to physically touch the device. Even if it's remote, the workflow often involves traversing a disjointed sea of separate tools: a monitoring console for the alert, an RMM for the connection, and a helpdesk for the ticket.
If you are still switching between three different screens just to restart a service or apply a patch, you aren't managing a modern IT environment. You’re manning a rowboat.
The Problem in Depth: The Cost of Context Switching
The reality for most sysadmins and MSP technicians is tool sprawl. You might have SolarWinds or Datadog for monitoring, a separate RMM like NinjaOne or ConnectWise for remote control, and a completely different PSA (Professional Services Automation) tool for ticketing.
This architecture is fundamentally broken for two reasons:
1. The "Tab-Switching" Tax When a critical alert fires at 2 AM—let's say a SQL Server service stops on a client's host—the workflow looks like this:
- Receive the alert in the monitoring tool.
- Log into the RMM tool (separate credentials, separate UI).
- Search for the device in the RMM.
- Initiate a remote session.
- Log into the PSA to update the ticket so the client knows you're working on it.
Every one of those steps adds latency. In a high-pressure scenario, that latency translates to downtime. If it takes 15 minutes just to get connected to the machine, you’ve already failed the SLA for a "critical" incident.
2. Data Blind Spots Because these tools don't talk to each other, you lose the narrative. Did the script you ran via RMM actually fix the issue? The monitoring tool might show the alert cleared, but the helpdesk ticket remains open. The technician has to manually close the loop. This lack of integration leads to "zombie tickets" and alert fatigue, where staff stop responding because they assume someone else handled it in another system.
How AlertMonitor Solves This: One Pane of Glass for Autonomous Ops
AlertMonitor is built on the same premise as Navantia’s drone ship: centralize command and control, and automate the response.
We don't just give you an RMM; we embed it directly into the monitoring timeline. When an alert triggers in AlertMonitor, you don't go to a different tool. You click "Remediate" right there in the incident view.
The Unified Workflow:
- Alert Triggers: AlertMonitor detects a disk space threshold breach on a Windows Server.
- Integrated RMM: The technician clicks the device in the alert timeline. The RMM module loads instantly—no second login, no new tab.
- Remote Execution: The technician runs a cleanup script via the built-in terminal or executes a pre-saved modular script (the "payload").
- Feedback Loop: The output of that script is immediately logged against the alert. If the disk space drops, the alert auto-resolves, and the ticket updates simultaneously.
This eliminates the "Tab-Switching Tax." We’ve seen IT teams reduce their Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by over 60% simply by removing the friction of jumping between platforms.
Practical Steps: Building Your Crewless Workflow
To operate a "crewless" IT fleet, you need to modularize your responses. You shouldn't be reinventing the wheel every time a service stops. You need scripts that are ready to deploy the moment the alert hits.
Here are three practical, copy-paste examples of RMM tasks you can run directly through AlertMonitor to handle common issues without ever physically touching the machine.
1. Automating Print Spooler Recovery
One of the most common helpdesk tickets is a stuck print spooler. Instead of remote controlling the user's desktop and navigating the Services MMC, push this script via AlertMonitor’s RMM console to clear the jam instantly.
# Stop the Print Spooler service
Stop-Service -Name "Spooler" -Force
# Remove pending print jobs
Remove-Item -Path "$env:SystemRoot\System32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*" -Force
# Restart the Print Spooler service
Start-Service -Name "Spooler"
Write-Output "Print Spooler reset successful."
2. Restarting a Hung Web Service (Linux)
For your Linux web servers, a stuck Nginx or Apache process can take down a client's site. Use this Bash script in AlertMonitor to restart the service gracefully or force it if necessary.
#!/bin/bash
SERVICE_NAME="nginx"
if systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE_NAME"; then echo "Restarting $SERVICE_NAME..." systemctl restart "$SERVICE_NAME" else echo "$SERVICE_NAME is not running. Attempting to start..." systemctl start "$SERVICE_NAME" fi
if systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE_NAME"; then echo "Success: $SERVICE_NAME is now running." else echo "Error: Failed to start $SERVICE_NAME." exit 1 fi
3. Identifying Heavy Resource Processes
When a CPU alert fires, you need to know what is causing it before you kill it. Run this PowerShell snippet to return the top 5 consuming processes directly to your AlertMonitor console.
Get-Process |
Sort-Object CPU -Descending |
Select-Object -First 5 -Property Id, ProcessName, CPU, WorkingSet |
Format-Table -AutoSize
Conclusion
Navantia’s warship proves that the future is autonomous, remote, and sensor-driven. Your IT infrastructure deserves the same approach. By unifying your monitoring and RMM, you stop sending technicians to fight fires manually and start managing your fleet with the precision of a modern command center.
Stop rowing. Start remotely managing.
Related Resources
AlertMonitor RMM & Remote Management AlertMonitor Platform Overview Book a Demo RMM & Remote Management Resources
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