Remote Server Monitoring and Management

What is remote server monitoring?

Server monitoring is the process of tracking server resources and metrics. This can help you ensure systems are working properly, monitor server performance, better understand how your resources are being used, and improve end-user experience.

Remote server monitoring applies the same principles of server monitoring to resources admins monitor, manage, and operate remotely. System administrators can use remote monitoring and management software, off-hours server support, and other solutions to extend their reach and control more services without having to be physically near them. Also, remote environments can improve efficiency, save money, and reduce the footprint of the data center. Remote server monitoring software helps keep these valuable servers running at their highest capacity.

A main benefit of remote server monitoring is being proactively notified of server performance issues before end users notice a problem. With remote server monitoring software, you can:

• Identify and troubleshoot issues related to server hardware health
• Monitor the overall performance and availability of your remote servers
• Identify other performance issues related to response time, resource utilization, and app downtime
• Remotely remediate performance issues, including rebooting servers, restarting websites, and more

What can I monitor in a server environment remotely?

With legacy hardware, virtual machines, thousands of applications, remote servers, and more, today’s server environments are highly complex. As such, there are many ways to approach server monitoring in your environment using a remote system monitor. To remotely monitor your server environment most effectively, you should pay special attention to remote system metrics, the health of critical hardware components, and Windows event logs.

Key metrics for remote server monitoring and troubleshooting slow systems include:

• CPU usage: Monitoring CPU usage can help you determine how much load is being placed on your remote server’s processor. You can load-balance apps using remote server monitoring software or upgrade and replace hardware to further boost performance.
• Physical memory: Remotely monitoring your server’s physical memory usage helps you see when you might need to add more RAM to your physical or virtual server.
• Virtual memory: When the physical disk encounters a bottleneck, virtual memory consumption increases. As data moves from RAM to disk and back to RAM.
• Disk performance: You can use a remote system monitor to keep an eye on your server’s queued I/O and disk latency and gain a better understanding of how storage performance impacts your applications.
• Event logs: Monitoring Windows event logs can also help you determine if there may be reliability issues in your remote server environment by providing information about events logged by applications, security events, system failures, and DNS events.

With the Real-Time Event Viewer in SAM remote server monitoring software, you can monitor Windows server event logs as they happen in addition to:

• Filtering events by log source, log type, and event level
• Viewing recent Windows event logs filtered by user requirements
• Proactively monitoring and receiving alerts about Windows event logs
• Tracking Windows event logs by specific criteria, including event ID, keywords, username, event type, and log source
• Scanning event logs on a Windows server and counting the number of events matching the user-specified rule

How to monitor performance in servers remotely

Remote performance monitoring for servers and standard server monitoring share many similarities and best practices. For example, infrastructure dependency mapping, server volume monitoring, and key server metrics are relevant to server performance monitoring no matter where your servers are located.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is designed to be a robust server monitoring solution and remote server monitoring software, with feature likes the Real-Time Process Explorer (RTPE) remote server management tool built to let you remotely monitor and quickly kill processes affecting server and app performance. You can also run RTPE to retrieve a machine’s vital statistics to gain a deeper understanding of monitored and unmonitored processes. Features like these can give you more granular access to your remote servers, helping streamline remote services monitoring by providing more detailed insights.

How does remote server monitoring work in SAM?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a robust and server environment monitor designed to make remote server monitoring easier and more intuitive for servers and applications from hypervisors and SaaS products to home-grown applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

With over 1,200 out-of-the-box monitoring templates, you can more easily get started monitoring performance and availability for  servers, applications, systems, and infrastructure in your environment—even remote servers. You can also create custom templates to build the remote server monitoring solution that makes sense for your business. SAM remote server monitoring software can collect key metrics like CPU usage, hard drive status, and array status to make it easier to drill down on the metrics that matter, track performance, and make more informed decisions using data-driven insights. You can also use the proprietary PerfStack, AppStack™, and AppInsight visualization and monitoring features to identify and remediate issues faster.

SAM is designed to give you the insights you need to stay on top of remote server performance to deliver the best possible experience to users.