Drupal shops often grow organically with staff members providing their own support. Monitoring the status of a site or equipment is often not in the equation. How can we provide monitoring and support to internal and external customers with Drupal installs and servers running both in house and remotely?

The answer is Nagios an open source monitoring system. Take a VM image or an old pc and create a system that will actively check all your Drupal sites, their servers and MySQL servers and notify you when anything goes wrong, down or gets plain overloaded. Nagios can give you the ability to know, evaluate and repair a problem before the client ever knows something is wrong.

You will still have to put out the fire but at least you will know there is smoke before anyone else.