This is a guest blog post from PC Monitor, one of our monitoring partners, about how to best use their system and PagerDuty together to tackle issues. 

Has a server ever gone down while you’ve been away from a computer and you had to scramble to get online to resolve the issue? Unfortunately, this happens way more than most people think and it can easily be avoided.

In today’s day and age, we live a fully connected life through some pretty incredible technology. With startups like SmartThings making our homes fully connected allowing us to control aspects of our home, it’s only fitting the same happen in the office.

According to eMarketer, smartphone users worldwide will total 1.75 billion in 2014, and more and more of those devices are not just for personal use anymore.

Busy IT system administrators are tasked with a very important job: making sure all systems are running smoothly. But when happens when something goes wrong?

Monitoring servers from your phone is just half the battle. The other half is taking action. And that’s exactly where Mobile PC Monitor comes in. Trusted by 250,000 consumers and professionals in over 100 countries around the world, PC Monitor is the easiest way to securely monitor and take action on any IT system remotely, from any smartphone or tablet.

Here are three tips on what to do if a system has issues, and you have both PagerDuty and PC Monitor working together.

1. Have a plan of attack ready

Setup alerts using PagerDuty to notify the correct people in case of an issue. Those alerts can be delivered either via phone, SMS or email. We always recommend having more than one person receiving alerts, and with different amounts of retries.

2. Take action

Once you get that alert via PagerDuty and you open the PC Monitor app on iOS, Android or Windows Phone, you have lots of options on how to attack the problem. PC Monitor enables users to run Terminal commands directly from the app. You can restart or shutdown if necessary, too.

3. Always be prepared

Have a game plan ready in case this happens again. Know exactly with commands to run, or what sequence to do things in. And make sure others know what the game plan is … not just you.

Integrating PagerDuty with PC Monitor is easy and only requires a few steps. PagerDuty has put together a guide to help you get fully setup with PC Monitor.