Server Monitoring Tools

Introduction to Server Monitoring Tools

For any IT organization maintaining its production environment is very critical as any defect will hamper its operation to a great extent. The server are the main backbone of any organizations and monitoring them on a regular basis is critical, and the organization does spend hefty amounts on this task as they do not want to unpredictable extended downtimes.

To have minimum downtime and to obtain the optimal performance from the website and other services, we need to constantly monitor the data center and other server infrastructure regularly. Thus to handle this monitoring, the server monitoring tools come in handy, and they basically monitor the CPU health, uptime, disk space, performance thresholds, etc.

Top Monitoring Tools Server

Server monitoring tools have a huge importance in any organization to monitor the health of its infrastructure and ensure great service to its customers by providing fast and reliable services. To maintain these trusts among its customers, the organization does need to employ better server monitoring tools so that it can provide uninterrupted services. If there are any maintenance activities, then the customers can be prior notified, and the activity needs to be completed in a defined SLA. Few popular tools include Datadog, Paessler PRTG, Nagios X1, Solar Winds Server and Application Monitoring Services, Zabbix, etc.

Let’s look in brief at some of the popular server monitoring tools below:

Here we will see about Datadog, PRTG, LogicMonitor, and Monitis.

1. Paessler PRTG

PRTG is one of the better and popular server monitoring tools which can help in monitoring ever distributed networks. There are predefined sensors that will be provided with PRTG that can start monitoring right away. PRTG server monitoring tool can be used in monitoring various services, and below are a few of them.

• Mail Server Monitoring: Mail servers are one of the main critical servers that need constant monitoring, and PRTG is one of the efficient service providers in this. Any glitch in the mail server will be problematic, and these kinds of tools can be Popular sensors for the mail server monitoring include IMAP, POP3, SMTP, etc.
• Web Server Monitoring: This particular server can be the deciding factor for many organizations, and PRTG has different servers available for web server monitoring.
• Database Server Monitoring: Database is critical as it stores highly critical data. Also, the performance of the database is important. PRTG has effective sensors for this monitoring as well.
• File Server Monitoring: File server monitoring is again one of the critical tasks, and PRTG has efficient sensors for this task.

2. Datadog

Datadog is the most popular monitoring service and is especially used for cloud-scale applications. Again as PRTG, this can be effectively be used to monitor mail server, web server, database server, file server, etc. Datadog provides these features through a SaaS-based data analytics framework. Datadog was formerly written in python, but the latest release employed some of the open-source and closed source technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra, D3, PostgreSQL, etc.

Datadog can support multiple cloud-based giants, and they include Amazon Web Services AWS, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, and Google Platform Cloud. Datadog is now associated with more than 350+ integrations. It has support for Windows, Linux, and as well as mac based systems.

Some of the features of datalog has been listed below:

• Datadog provides a single view to the infrastructure to the IT or DevOps team so that the team is aware of the server infrastructure and its health.
• Datadog provides customizable dashboards, so the metrics are easily understood.
• The alert notification is one of the best features of datadog, and this helps in tracking and resolving critical issues.
• Supports many integrations.
• It is efficient in analyzing logs to understand the latency and error rates.
• It supports many applications that have been written in different languages, which can be a python, java, PHP, .NET, Go, Node, etc.

3. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is again one of the popular network monitoring tools that provide high visibility of the networking infrastructure along with other IT related infrastructures under one unified platform. Some of the best features of LogicMonitor is given below:

• Easily deployable and can be tested for free before actual deployment. The lightweight feature of LogicMonitor makes this possible.
• Provides coverage to most of the complex networks, which can spread to multiple data centers.
• LogicMonitor provides support to the software-defined networks with partner Cisco.
• Provide effective dashboard, topology mapping, elevated visibility for the tracking network, and server performances. This helps in identifying any anomaly in the performance trends of the infrastructure.
• The troubleshoot for the LogicMonitor is faster, and LogicMonitor also provides reduced alert noise.

4. Monitis

The Tag line from the monitis official site says, “Take Your Sever Proframance To The Next Level”, and its popularity of it among organizations justify this tag. The monitis server monitoring is quite cost-effective, and it can monitor key performances in a much shorter time. Some of the better features of the monitis server monitoring tool are below:

• Provides broad visibility to the IT infrastructure.
• Since montis is cloud-based, we can monitor the performance from anywhere.
• Provides a simplified solution to all the monitoring requirements under one platform.
• The alert feature and the insightful reports from monitis make sure that we always stay on top of the issues. This helps to sense prior that something is wrong and needs to be worked upon.
• It can be used for both Windows and Linux deployments.
• It coves disk, storage, CPU, website, server health checks in its package of monitoring.

Conclusion

Today the business of the organization depends on how stable and consistent service is provided by them. Thus business needs not only need better infrastructure to provide consistent services but also require better monitoring tools so that the infrastructure like networks and data centers’ health is constantly monitored and any abnormality can be caught quickly. Thus having minimum or no impact on the services to its clients. This article covers a few such popular tools that can be used to monitor your server with minimum manual interventions.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Server Monitoring Tools. Here we also discuss the introduction and top 4 monitoring tools of the server along with an explanation. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Bandwidth Monitoring Tools
2. Java Monitoring Tool
3. MongoDB Monitoring
4. Kubernetes Tools