POS Monitoring
We believe that every company using POS devices should invest in POS monitoring software. As companies are increasingly reliant on their POS systems, POS downtime means loss of revenue and bad customer service. It may even result in customers searching for alternative suppliers which may become a long term trend.
Point of sales (POS) monitoring software can detect failures and alert you or your POS support company by SMS text messages or email as soon as, or even sometimes before outages happen.
Please click here for more information about the advantages of POS monitoring.
Configurable Daily Checks
Configurable Real Time Checks
The Agent
Features of Electronic Point of Sale (POS) Monitoring
Bast POS Monitoring is more than just POS monitoring software, it’s a service. We not only monitor your POS devices, but we support, install and manage the POS monitoring software. We provide the expertise, so you just say what you want and we make it happen; and if you don’t know what you want, we offer free consultation to help you decide.
We offer a variety of EFTPOS and POS monitoring solutions and can monitor systems with a variety of monitors from simply checking if the POS device is online, to detecting specific hardware problems, such as hard drive failure, etc.
Bast POS monitoring not only detects problems with Electronic Point of Sales systems, but offers Trend Analysis and Fault History reporting. Identifying trends is an important part of POS monitoring because it helps to view the problems and faults encountered as symptoms, which enables you to identify and prevent other problems in the future. This stops you from firefighting and allows you to take control of your environment.
Bast POS Monitoring also offers a dashboard to view the state of all your POS and EFTPOS devices and enables reporting, such as inventory reports which can show what software is installed on each device. Reports can also be automatically emailed to you or your support company on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
To aid support, Bast POS Monitoring also enables remote access and full alerting (SMS and email).
Types of POS Monitoring Available
The POS monitoring checks available are split into two groups, Real-Time POS Monitoring and Daily POS Monitoring Checks.
Real-Time POS Monitoring offers up to date POS monitoring checks, alerting you when problems occur. These include (but are not limited to) line checks (seeing if the POS device is online), SNMP monitoring (this alerts you to things like the device not being turned off properly and a variety of other things) and performance monitoring (CPU monitoring and RAM monitoring, etc).
Daily POS Monitoring checks ensure that the POS machine is secure and healthy and offers some trend analysis monitoring such as reporting critical events at the end of the day or drive space consumption changes. Due to the nature of point of sales systems, often these sorts of checks can highlight potential problems so they can be investigated before they can manifest themselves. This brings increased uptime to your EPOS systems.
| Real-Time POS / EFTPOS Monitoring Checks | ||
| Drive Space Monitoring Check | Monitors the EPOS device’s drive space in real-time to ensure you don’t run out of space | |
| Performance Monitoring Checks | CPU Monitoring, CPU Utilisation, CPU Queue length, Memory Usage, Network Interface Utilisation and Physical Disk Performance monitoring ensures that the EPOS devices are running quickly and reliably. This type of POS monitoring can also help troubleshoot other issues | |
| TCP Port Monitoring Check | Check that POS, EFTPOS and other devices attached to your network are communicating on the ports they should be – useful for troubleshooting attached devices without an interface such as EFTPOS devices | |
| Website Monitoring Check | Useful for applications delivered through a web interface | |
| Windows Service Monitoring Check | This ensures that the operating system and applications running on EPOS systems are working. This is also a useful troubleshooting aid | |
| SNMP Monitoring | This allows communication with POS / EFTPOS devices that are SNMP enabled. It gives you very specific reports of the device, one example of this is that it will tell you when the device was powered off and if that was a cold boot or a warm boot… | |
| BandWidth Monitoring | Monitor whether the network connection to the EFTPOS or POS device is over-utilized. This can help identify viruses or help with troubleshooting difficult issues | |
| Filesize Monitoring Check | This is useful for monitoring EPOS database sizes in real-time to make sure they don’t grow too large or fluctuate (which can be a useful troubleshooting tool) | |
| Event Log Monitoring Check | This can alert you to specific events that might highlight problems with EPOS equipment | |
| Ping Monitoring Check (Network Monitoring) | This monitors whether networked devices such as EFTPOS or indeed other EPOS devices are available to the network | |
| Daily POS Monitoring Checks | ||
| Anti-Virus Monitoring | This monitors whether the antivirus software is updating or not. Many viruses will attempt to disable or hinder antivirus software so the updates never occur and the virus is never detected. This is becoming increasingly important as Point of Sale systems move towards a Windows based platform which is connected to a network with internet access. It won’t take long for hackers to realize that there is big money in writing viruses specifically for Point of Sales systems to steal customers credit card details or obtain information which can enable identity fraud of either the business or the customers | |
| Backup Monitoring | This monitors many different backup systems to ensure that backups of POS databases, were successful and send an alert if not | |
| Drive Space Consumtion Monitoring | This monitors hard drive space changes to alert you if there are spurious changes. This can aid troubleshooting and more commonly identify issues before they cause problems and stop EPOS terminals from working | |
| Hacker Monitoring | This monitors hackers attempts to perform “brute force” attacks on EPOS machines, which is a common form of attack which can be delivered from a virus or over the network | |
| Physical Disk Monitoring | This will monitor the EPOS hard disks using SMART technology and check whether they are reporting faults before they cause problems. This can really increase your uptime | |
| Critical Events Monitoring | This alerts the engineer at the end of the day of all the critical events that have been generated. It can be used as a very quick and easy trend analysis or can be used to help ensure the EPOS system is working smoothly | |
| File Size Monitoring | This is useful for monitoring Point of Sales database sizes or backup file sizes to make sure they don’t grow too large bythe end of the day | |
| Event Log Monitoring | This allows you to look out for specific events or types of events which can be used for trend analysis or a summary at the end of the day | |
POS Monitoring Packages
We currently have two POS monitoring packages available, “Custom POS Monitoring” and “Discounted POS Monitoring”. We are happy to put a package together for you to suit your businesses needs and budget, alternatively you can make your own package from the options below.
Custom POS Monitoring
Custom POS Monitoring is our ultimiate Electronic Point of Sale monitoring software. It allows the user to select from the full list of available monitors from both Daily and Real-Time checks. It offers the most up to date network monitoring with full SMS alerts, reporting and all that Bast has to offer.
Discounted POS Monitoring
Bast Discount POS Monitoring provides your business with significantly discounted software monitoring for your Electronic Point of Sales and EFTPOS systems. It leverages a light version of the POS monitoring agent on one server or PC to monitor the availability of all POS devices and the Bast Workstation Agent to monitor the following aspects of the POS devices:
| Event Log Checks | Alerts are generated if any critical alerts are found |
| Anti Virus Update Checks | Ensures that the POS devices antivirus is up to date |
| Drive Space Change Checks | Identifys spurious changes in disk space to ensure POS devices are properly maintained |
| Disk Health Checks | Alerts you to potential disk failure to proactively identify problems |
| Hacker Attempt Checks | Monitors failed logins to identify hacker attempts, preventing brute force attacks |
| Windows Services Checks | Alerts are generated if services that start with Windows fail at any time |
| SNMP Check/RAID Array Checks | Responds and alerts you to SNMP traps sent by failing RAID arrays |
| Automated Tasks | Automate maintenance tasks and reduce support calls. Tasks include Disk Defragmentation, Clearing Event Logs, Temp Files and Cookies |
As with the Custom POS monitoring the availability of servers is monitored every 15 minutes, though this may be upgraded to every 5 minutes for a small fee. Unlike the Custom POS Monitoring however, Bast Discount Monitoring checks are performed only once an hour, though this may be upgraded to every 30 minutes for a very small price.
Bast Discount Monitoring is typically used to fit a tighter budget or to monitor less critical devices. It gives the option to upgrade the POS monitoring agent to include additional monitors; in this scenario, the POS monitoring agent is typically placed on a a critical POS device where the additional network monitoring software features can be best leveraged.
For more information about monitoring or to buy please contact us!