How monitoring alerts helped me trace a recurring outage to one failing switch

amit becky — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:16:44 +0000

B"H

For a while I had this recurring problem — servers would just drop off the
network randomly, no clear pattern, and every time it happened I'd spend
ages trying to figure out why. Nothing obvious ever connected the dots.

I started running AITMonitor (a lightweight Windows server monitoring tool
I've been building) across my environment, mostly just to get visibility.
At some point it flagged a specific switch as going down. On its own that
wasn't a big deal — but then I noticed a pattern: every time that switch
alert fired, a bunch of other machines also showed as down around the
same time.

That was the piece I was missing. Once I had alerts with actual timestamps
across multiple machines, it was easy to see they all traced back to the
same switch — everything connected to it was dropping whenever it had
issues. Before that I had no way to correlate "server X is down" with
"the switch is flaky," because nothing was tracking both at once.

Replaced the switch, problem gone.

Wasn't expecting a monitoring tool to help me find a hardware issue like
that — I built it mainly for CPU/memory/disk alerts — but having timestamped
alerts across multiple machines side by side ended up being the thing that
actually let me connect the dots.

If anyone's curious about the tool itself: aitsimple.com/aitmonitor . Free for up to 5
servers if you want to try it on a real environment.

DEV Community: amit becky

How monitoring alerts helped me trace a recurring outage to one failing switch