What is server monitoring? Server monitoring is the process of gaining visibility into the activities of both physical and virtual servers. Servers can process thousands of requests simultaneously, providing information to multiple applications on demand. Therefore, guaranteeing that all of an organization’s servers are operating according to expectations is an integral aspect of IT infrastructure management.
A server can be a physical machine or a virtual server hosted on a physical machine and shared by many users, each running their own individual web server system. Server monitoring is the ongoing practice of monitoring any type of server to guarantee uptime, consistency, and high-level performance. Server monitoring focuses on ensuring continuous availability required for the best possible user experience.
Peerspot members who have purchased server monitoring software emphasize administrative efficiency as a key selection criterion. Members want server monitoring packages to be easy to use and configure out of the box. Once implemented, the solution should not require excessive administrative time. User express an interest in having a single pane of glass for the whole stack that gives the admin a view from storage up to the application tier. An SDK is cited as a helpful feature in this regard.
Server monitoring software packages have to be able to scale. Users demand scalable products and heterogeneous OS coverage. But, scale cannot add complexity. PeerSpot members share they want tools that offer an integrated central approach to monitoring.
Specific features that affect selection include event management capabilities and the proactive ability to head off failures. Being able to create custom events enables admins to tune monitoring and customize the process for specific devices – it keeps the admin on top of top of issues that affect the stability of the environment. Monitoring should ideally not be passive. Users want to be alerted of potential problems before they happen and be able to quantify and report on what is happening with servers.
Servers are critical for the operations of an organization’s IT environment, and therefore it is vital to monitor their performance and uptime. If a web server is offline, slow, experiencing outages, or suffering from other performance issues, customers may become frustrated and go elsewhere. If an internal file server is generating errors, important company information can become corrupted.
Server monitoring is designed to monitor servers and provide metrics to IT teams with information about their functionality. A server monitoring tool tests for availability - ensuring that the server is alive and responsive, measures server response time, and alerts in the event of missing or damaged files, security breaches, and other issues. Server monitoring can test if a server is close to reaching its full capacity and provides statistics on memory and CPU usage. While server monitoring tools mainly process data in real time, they also save logs, enabling users to analyze them to determine if a server’s performance has lagged over time.
Server monitoring tools are available in both software as a service (SaaS) and on-site models and provide a view into the entire server infrastructure. These tools offer dashboards designed for setting up metrics, anomaly detection, alerts, and logs, providing insights into the entire server environment.
By monitoring CPU, memory, disk usage, and network bandwidth, server monitoring tools guarantee that sufficient resources are available for running their processes.
Some of the benefits of using server monitoring tools include:
When choosing a server monitoring tool, here are some features to look out for:
