What Linux Retainer Clients Actually Receive Every Month
Most managed service providers send you a bill every month. Some send a ticket count. A few send a PDF that looks like it was generated by software and reads like it was written by nobody.
Here’s what AV Services sends — and what happens in between.
The monthly health report
Every retainer client gets a written health report. Not a dashboard. Not an auto-generated summary. A report that someone actually wrote, describing what happened on your server that month.
It covers:
- Kernel and package patch status — what was patched, when, and whether a reboot was required
- Backup verification — not just “backup ran” but “backup ran, restore was tested, file count matched”
- Disk usage trend — current usage, rate of growth, projected time to threshold
- Login and access log review — any unusual patterns, failed attempts, IPs flagged by fail2ban
- Cron job verification — each scheduled job confirmed to have run and produced valid output
- Any incidents — what happened, what was done, current status
If nothing unusual happened, the report says so. That’s not a failure of the service. That’s the service working.
What monitoring actually means at 3am
A client in Navi Mumbai — diagnostic imaging centre, 4,000 active patients — had a brute-force SSH attempt at 3am on a Tuesday in March 2021. 847 login attempts in 90 seconds from a known malicious range.
Fail2ban blocked it automatically. The IP was reviewed, made permanent, and an incident report was filed before the first shift started. The client found out when the monthly report landed in their inbox — one page, what happened, what was blocked, what was done.
No data accessed. No downtime. No call at 3am.
That’s what monitoring means. The system acts. The record is kept. You find out in the report.
What an AV Services retainer includes — every month, in writing.
Security patching — monthly, not eventually
Every retainer server gets patched monthly. Kernel updates, package updates, security fixes. Scheduled during low-traffic windows. Tested. Documented.
The alternative is what a Mumbai e-commerce client had when they called at 11pm on a Saturday with their site down. Kernel unpatched for 847 days. Multiple CVEs with published exploits sitting open. Disk at 94%. Backup silently failing for four months.
That Saturday night cost more than two years of retainer fees. In one incident.
What you don’t get
No ticket system. No SLA calculator. No account manager who hasn’t touched a server in five years.
You get Arun. Direct line. If he’s unreachable, Krishna or Sanjay picks up — they have standing access to every client’s runbook, monitoring stack, and documentation. There’s no handoff. There’s continuity.
The retainer tiers
Three tiers: ₹15,000, ₹30,000, ₹50,000 per month depending on server count and complexity. Month-to-month. No lock-in.
The free 30-minute audit tells you which tier fits before you commit to anything.
See what the reports actually look like
Specimen retainer reports are on the site. Read one before you decide.
View specimen reports → Book free audit →