Infrastructure Health Checks Before Holiday Slowdowns: Lessons Learned and Smarter Steps for Tenured IT Teams

Every IT veteran knows the feeling. The holidays are approaching, projects are wrapping up, and the business is slowing down. Ticket volumes drop, and so does operational urgency. It feels like the perfect time to run maintenance and tidy up loose ends.

Many teams have tried to use this quieter season for infrastructure health checks in the past. The plan might have looked good: deploy patches, archive logs, restart critical services, and call it done. Yet when January arrives, familiar issues resurface. Patch compliance is incomplete, alerting is noisy, and a few servers seem to have drifted out of sync again.

What went wrong? And what can an experienced IT team do differently this time? This guide explores where traditional end-of-year maintenance tends to fall short and how to execute a smarter, more reliable infrastructure health check before the holiday slowdown.

Why Traditional Holiday Maintenance Often Fails

Tenured IT teams rarely fail because of inexperience. The problem is often about timing, assumptions, and verification. Over the years, several patterns repeat across organizations:

1. Rushed patching without validation
   Many teams push updates quickly to close the year. Without confirming installation results, systems stay partially vulnerable.
2. Surface-level cleanup
   Clearing logs or restarting services gives a temporary sense of progress but does not address deeper configuration issues or legacy components.
3. Outdated monitoring thresholds
   Alert policies designed for peak operations can create noise in slower periods. Many teams silence alerts instead of refining them.
4. Poor documentation and hand-offs
   Maintenance happens, but it is rarely logged clearly enough for those covering on-call rotations.
5. No baseline metrics
   Without capturing system performance during quiet periods, there is no way to measure improvement or detect early regression in the new year.
6. Reduced staff coverage
   Fewer people are available to respond. Minor alerts may linger longer than expected and turn into downtime.

This year’s health check should focus on closing these gaps through verification, documentation, and smarter monitoring.

Step 1: Conduct a Grounded Asset and Device Review

A reliable infrastructure check starts with visibility. Experienced teams often assume their inventory is accurate, but drift happens fast. Use this period to verify what is actually in service.

• Identify endpoints that have not checked in for several weeks. Determine if they are decommissioned or disconnected.
• Audit warranty dates and replacement cycles to avoid unplanned failures.
• Review OS and firmware versions across all devices. Highlight systems that are unsupported or nearing end-of-life.
• Ensure device tags and group assignments align with your business structure.

Past health checks often stopped after listing assets. Go further by confirming which ones are still relevant, secure, and actively maintained.

Step 2: Patch with Precision and Verification

End-of-year patch blitzes often fail because they prioritize speed over confirmation. An update that never completes can be more dangerous than one that was never started.

To improve patch effectiveness:

• Run a readiness check to find devices with missing dependencies or low disk space.
• Group updates logically by OS or department instead of pushing everything at once.
• Verify each patch through system logs and status reports.
• Keep a record of skipped or deferred systems and schedule a follow-up date.

Many teams have patched aggressively in previous years but skipped post-patch validation. This time, treat verification as part of the patch process, not an afterthought.

Step 3: Recalibrate Monitoring and Alerts

Monitoring that works in July can misfire in December. Lower usage changes what “normal” looks like, and thresholds that were fine at full load may now trigger constant false positives.

This season, take a fresh look at your alerting policies:

• Review and adjust CPU, memory, and disk thresholds based on current usage.
• Disable or update alerts tied to decommissioned systems.
• Verify routing so that the right on-call engineers receive notifications.
• Set up summary reports that provide daily or weekly status updates instead of real-time alerts.

In the past, many teams responded to excessive alerts by silencing them completely. That short-term peace often led to missing real incidents. Smarter tuning keeps visibility intact without overwhelming your team.

Step 4: Stress-Test and Validate Scaling Policies

Even when traffic slows, your infrastructure should be ready for sudden demand spikes. Teams that skip testing often discover problems when load increases again in January.

During your health check:

• Run controlled load tests on critical systems. Observe performance under simulated spikes.
• Validate cloud autoscaling rules and triggers. Adjust thresholds if they no longer reflect realistic workloads.
• Confirm redundancy and failover readiness. Ensure backup nodes are updated and online.
• Test VPN capacity and remote access throughput for distributed teams.

In previous years, many IT teams trusted that scaling and redundancy were functioning without testing them. This time, confirm readiness with data.

Step 5: Review Remote Access and Background Management

When staff coverage is reduced, remote control becomes your safety net. Do not assume that what worked last month will perform the same way under holiday conditions.

Checklist for remote readiness:

• Verify that remote sessions connect reliably and log activity properly.
• Confirm authentication requirements such as multi-factor verification.
• Test background management for silent restarts and service checks.
• Ensure audit logs are stored securely and reviewed regularly.

Past incidents often trace back to untested remote access or outdated credentials. A few proactive checks now can prevent a holiday escalation later.

Step 6: Automate the Repetitive Work

Holiday periods are ideal for improving automation. Many teams have written scripts for recurring tasks but never scheduled them consistently. This is the time to put automation into production.

Automate tasks like:

• Log cleanup and temporary file removal.
• Backup verification and disk space checks.
• Routine restarts for non-critical services.
• Validation of running processes and scheduled jobs.

Automation converts tribal knowledge into repeatable reliability. In past years, teams often relied on individuals to run scripts manually, creating inconsistency. This year, let the system handle it.

Step 7: Strengthen Documentation and On-Call Handoffs

When fewer people are on duty, clarity matters more than speed. Documentation ensures that whoever is available can act quickly and confidently.

Before the slowdown:

• Update on-call schedules and escalation paths.
• Generate a short summary report on system health and outstanding issues.
• Record deferred tasks and upcoming maintenance windows.
• Confirm that credentials and access tokens are stored securely but remain accessible to authorized staff.

Teams that skip documentation often face confusion in January when returning staff need to re-learn what changed. Good handoffs save hours of rework.

Step 8: Reassess Security and Compliance

Attackers know that IT departments are quieter during the holidays. Security checks should be an essential part of your infrastructure health review.

Actions to prioritize:

• Run vulnerability scans on external and internal systems.
• Review firewall and VPN access logs for anomalies.
• Verify that backups are encrypted and restorable.
• Revalidate multi-factor authentication and access rights.
• Remove dormant admin accounts and outdated privileges.

In past years, many teams delayed remediation of known vulnerabilities until after the new year. This quiet season is the right time to fix them without impacting production.

Step 9: Capture Performance Baselines

The slower pace of the holidays creates an ideal opportunity to record baseline metrics. Without these, it is difficult to measure whether your systems are improving or degrading over time.

Record:

• CPU, memory, and disk utilization averages.
• Network latency and packet loss at idle.
• Backup success rates and job duration.
• Endpoint compliance and patch coverage.

Many IT teams skip this step because they focus on reactive metrics. Capturing clean baselines now provides valuable benchmarks for proactive analysis later.

Step 10: Consolidate and Simplify Tooling with Level

The most time-consuming part of infrastructure maintenance is coordinating between different tools for monitoring, patching, automation, and reporting. A unified IT management platform like Level simplifies that complexity.

Level brings device inventory, patch automation, monitoring, remote access, and scripting into one dashboard. It allows experienced teams to perform full infrastructure health checks without switching tools or losing visibility. With built-in automation and reporting, you can schedule maintenance, monitor progress, and verify success during the holiday slowdown.

For teams that have struggled with scattered tools or manual coordination in past years, consolidation is the next logical step.

Lessons Learned and What to Do Differently This Year

Every experienced IT professional has seen maintenance plans that looked great but underperformed. The most common mistakes from previous years include:

• Patching without confirming results.
• Cleaning up logs instead of solving root causes.
• Silencing alerts instead of refining them.
• Running one-time scripts instead of automated workflows.
• Leaving knowledge undocumented for the next rotation.

The difference between repeating those outcomes and improving lies in discipline and visibility. Use this year’s holiday slowdown to do what was missing before: validate, automate, and document.

The Payoff of a Smarter Health Check

By taking a structured approach, you can enter the new year with an infrastructure that is cleaner, faster, and more resilient. You will reduce noise, improve security posture, and start January with full confidence in your environment.

A successful pre-holiday health check delivers:

• Verified patch compliance across all endpoints.
• Clear, actionable alerts with minimal noise.
• Tested remote access and automated maintenance tasks.
• Up-to-date documentation and clear accountability.
• Reliable performance baselines for future comparison.

The quiet season is not just downtime; it is an opportunity to reset and prepare for growth. With the right preparation, your IT infrastructure can operate smoothly through the holidays and beyond.