FAQs
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How is proactive monitoring different from antivirus?
Antivirus watches for malicious files and behaviors. Proactive monitoring watches for everything else: the hardware health, the patch status, the disk capacity, the performance trends, the backup health, and the sign-in patterns. The two work together. Antivirus is one piece of the security signal that proactive monitoring brings into a single view alongside the operational signal.
Does the monitoring agent slow down the device?
The agent runs at very low priority and uses a small amount of memory and almost no CPU under normal conditions. Users do not notice it is there. The CinchOps standard is that the monitoring agent should be invisible to the user experience; if a user reports that their device feels slow, the agent gets reviewed as part of the troubleshooting but in practice the agent is rarely the cause.
What is the difference between proactive monitoring and patch management?
Patch management is the work of applying operating system and application updates on a schedule. Proactive monitoring includes patch status as one of the signals it watches, alongside hardware health, disk capacity, backup health, and security telemetry. Patch management is a piece of the larger monitoring service. CinchOps includes both as part of the standard managed agreement, not as separate add-ons.
What about employees who work from home?
The monitoring agent works the same whether the device is on the office network, on a home network, or on a coffee shop network. It reports back over the internet to the management platform, so a remote employee's laptop gets the same level of monitoring as an office workstation. Patches get applied, security signal gets reported, and issues get caught regardless of where the employee is physically working.
What do you do about devices that go offline for long periods?
The platform tracks how long each managed device has been offline. Devices that have not checked in for more than thirty days get flagged for review, in case the device was lost, retired without being deprovisioned, or is sitting in storage. The CinchOps team confirms with the client what the device is doing and either gets it back online or formally retires it from the asset record.