CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

What should be disabled on a server when performing maintenance and installing patches to prevent notifications?

1. alerting

2. monitoring

3. authentication

4. auditing

The correct answer is: alerting

Disabling alerting on a server during maintenance and patch installation is essential to prevent unnecessary notifications from being triggered by routine activities or changes made during the process. Alerting systems are designed to notify administrators about various events, such as system performance issues, errors, or other changes within the environment. When maintenance is taking place, these alerts could create confusion, as they might not reflect actual issues but rather be a result of the planned activities, such as restarts, service interruptions, or configuration changes. Focusing on alerting allows the IT team to concentrate on the maintenance tasks at hand without being distracted by alerts that do not indicate a real-time problem. Once maintenance is complete, alerting can be re-enabled to ensure that any legitimate issues can be monitored effectively. Monitoring might still be necessary during maintenance to track system performance, while authentication ensures secure access to the server, and auditing tracks changes for compliance purposes. Each of these functions plays a critical role in overall server management, but alerting specifically requires attention to prevent noise during maintenance windows.