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The term Server Monitoring, whilst put simply can be defined as the practice of obtaining into the behavior of your servers both physical and virtual, can be deemed complex. This is purely due to the vast range of servers that exist. Due to this, it is difficult to place a ‘one size fits all’ approach to Server Monitoring. This is due to the fact that overseeing and providing alerts for issues on multiple servers demands a specific level of technological supervision, and the standard server monitoring tool may not be suitable for each of them.
Therefore, within this article, we will deepen your understanding of the term Server Monitoring and what it entails. As well as explain what Server Monitoring as a Service (SMaaS) is and how it works, including use cases and how it may be the most appropriate solution for your team and organization.
Contents
What is Server Monitoring?
Server monitoring is the process of continuously observing and measuring the health, performance, and availability of computer servers in an organization's IT infrastructure. It entails gathering and analyzing data from these servers to guarantee that they work efficiently and effectively. Server Monitoring is a broad term and can encompass a variety of metrics and features, such as monitoring performance metrics, measuring response times, analyzing server health, resource utilization, security monitoring, and alerting and capacity planning.
What is Server Monitoring as a Service?
Server Monitoring as a Service (SMaaS) is a cloud-based service provided by third-party providers, such as Logit.io that enables organizations to monitor the health, performance, and availability of their servers and IT infrastructure components remotely. Instead of managing server monitoring and infrastructure on their premises, organizations subscribe to SMaaS solutions to outsource the tasks to specialized service providers.
Server Monitoring Challenges
Server Monitoring is often crucial for maintaining the health and performance of your IT infrastructure, particularly servers. Yet when it comes to implementation, it does possess its own set of challenges.
As IT environments are frequently complex, with a mix of physical and virtual servers, cloud services, and numerous applications. Monitoring diverse setups such as these can be challenging. This can make it difficult to attain a holistic view of your entire infrastructure, leading to gaps in your observability. Therefore, server monitoring should be combined with other monitoring tools and data to provide a more complete picture.
Another challenge of server monitoring is data overload. Due to the great extent of data that servers produce, monitoring tools can generate an overwhelming number of alerts and metrics and sorting through this data to highlight critical issues can quickly become challenging. This can lead to alert fatigue, delayed response to critical issues, and difficulty in distinguishing the difference between routine events and potential problems.
Server Monitoring: How it works
The ongoing practice of continuously overseeing and evaluating the well-being, efficiency, and accessibility of computer servers within an organization's IT infrastructure is referred to as server monitoring. To better understand the process, it can broken down into a few key steps:
1. Data Collection: In the first stage, server monitoring tools are positioned on the server to collect data. These tools can include software applications, agents, or scripts that periodically collect data.
2. Performance Metrics: The server monitoring tool or agent will gather an array of performance metrics, including but not limited to memory usage, CPU utilization, server response times, disk space availability, and network traffic and bandwidth.
3. Thresholds and Baselines: Once you have begun collecting data, you will then focus on outlining thresholds for each metric. These thresholds state the acceptable range of values. When a metric falls below or exceeds these thresholds, it triggers an alert.
4. Alerting: Now you’ve set parameters for each metric, it’s important that you can act quickly when an issue arises. This can be done through alerts. The monitoring tools constantly compare the gathered metrics to the outline thresholds. When a metric breaches a threshold or deviates significantly from its baseline, the monitoring system generates alerts. Alerts can be in the form of text messages, emails, or notifications to a central dashboard.
5. Analysis and Response: After collecting the alerts, your team can begin analyzing the situation to determine the root cause of the issue. Some of these actions to improve the situation can include applying patches, addressing security threats, and adjusting server resources.
6. Historical Data: You can conduct trend analysis as a Server Monitoring solution will store historical data over time. Trend analysis is effective for capacity planning, identifying long-term performance issues, and making informed decisions about resource allocation.
7. Security Monitoring: The majority of Server Monitoring solutions will incorporate security monitoring capabilities. These features can track security events, intrusion attempts, and unauthorized access to the server.
Server Monitoring Best Practices
Ensuring that you conduct effective server monitoring is vital for maintaining the health, performance, and security of your IT infrastructure.
1. Outline Objectives and Tools: Clearly define the objectives of server monitoring including performance optimization, fault detection, capacity planning, and security. Also, select the monitoring tools that best align with your organisations needs.
2. Monitor KPIs: Highlight and monitor vital server metrics, such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network latency, and system uptime.
3. Set Thresholds and Prioritise Alerts: Outline threshold values for critical metrics and establish alerts to notify IT teams when thresholds are exceeded. Then, prioritize alerts based on their impact on business operations.
4. Implement Redundancy and High Availability: Guarantee redundancy and high availability of critical server components to reduce downtime. Monitor failover mechanisms to ensure they function as expected during a failure.
5. Monitor Network Performance and Disk Space: Regularly check and monitor disk space usage and keep an eye on network performance metrics such as bandwidth usage, packet loss, and latency.
6. Capacity Planning: Monitor resource utilization trends and plan for future capacity needs. Proactively rectify capacity issues to prevent performance degradation and unplanned downtime.
Server Monitoring as a Service Use Cases
Server Monitoring as a Service (SMaaS) solutions, like the one from Logit.io, are a great cost-effective option for organizations looking to monitor their servers and reduce the burden of maintaining the tool itself. There are a wide variety of use cases for the tool, particularly due to the varying amount of servers that exist. However, we’ve listed some of the most common use cases below.
Firstly, a common use case of a Server Monitoring as a Service tool is real-time performance monitoring. SMaaS continuously collects, processes, and interprets data from monitored servers in near real-time and tracks performance metrics like CPU usage, memory utilization, network bandwidth, and response times. This real-time monitoring is essential for highlighting performance issues promptly.
Another common use case of Server Monitoring as a Service is resource optimization. The SMaaS solution can aid organizations by highlighting underutilized or overutilized servers to optimize server resources. By monitoring resource utilization, companies can allocate resources effectively and reduce wastage.
A final recurrent use case of Server Monitoring as a Service is the monitoring of servers across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Organizations with multi-cloud or hybrid environments can utilize SMaaS to monitor servers across various cloud providers and on-premises data centers. This streamlines management and provides a single point of control for IT teams to guarantee consistent monitoring and reporting.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our Server Monitoring as a Service (SMaaS) solution, you can read more here (link to SMaaS landing page) or reach out to one of our engineers via the live chat.
If you’ve enjoyed this article why not read The Best Cloud Monitoring Tools or The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools