Any Business Can Benefit From Server Monitoring

Seeing the health of business critical servers and applications can be very difficult, especially in an environment with many different physical and virtual servers and applications. This is why you will need to choose an application with server monitoring that will keep track of every one of these things.

It is crucial that the chosen application be simple to use. This means it must be easy and quick for the system administrator to set up on each server or application. By doing this, all the work may be multiplied by numerous servers and applications as needed to increase visibility to the IT environment in a timely manner.

A server monitoring application gets metrics from the operating system and also certain applications to make sure everything is running fine. The monitoring application will have thresholds to watch out for that would indicate an issue. For example, if a load average on a Linux or Unix system is too high, this is often the classic indication there is a problem somewhere with the application of the server.

Typically, the information will be configured from the server to be sent to the monitoring application over the network, which usually resides within its own physical or virtual server instance. In many cases, the SNMP network protocol can be used for this purpose. Then an application will send alerts once the thresholds have been exceeded, which may indicate some kind of a problem.

The application with the server monitor can run in several environments. Typically, all popular operating systems are available with most applications including Microsoft Windows Server, several variants of Linux, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, and VMware. The actual list depends upon the specific application.

It’s possible to have the application monitor some common applications out of the box like Apache Tomcat and Apache Web Server. For all custom and proprietary applications, it is possible to write short scripts that will monitor applications which are not already supported. Generally, programming the support for other applications is fairly easy to do for most system administrators.

There are two methods for getting the monitoring information. The very first method is to log into the console. Depending on the Server Monitoring application, it might be web based or with a thick client. This way you’ll be able to create graphs and reports on what is happening within the IT environment. It’s also possible to track the exact time of outages and other times of performance degradation for additional study.

The other way to get information from a monitoring application is via alerts. Alerts may be sent via email to any regular email account. It may also be sent via text message to a mobile phone so that an administrator can take the proper action, which can mean fixing the issue or clearing the alert status. This is an excellent way for businesses to reduce the degree of downtime that exists within the IT environment since problems can be detected relatively quickly with a monitoring application.