Server Monitoring Software and Performance Monitoring Solution

What is server monitoring?

Server monitoring is a process through which system resources related to relevant servers are tracked for specific states and changes. Server performance monitoring can help keep track of the hardware and processes critical for keeping the server functional and can help make sure your system is generally performing optimally.

Beyond helping IT administrators catch performance issues before they affect end users, server monitoring can also help optimize application and server performance to improve efficiency and end user experience.

How does server monitoring work?

Server monitoring works by enabling the regular collection of data on your system resources, so you’re aware of any issues at the first sign of performance problems. Server monitoring can either be automated using server monitoring tools or performed manually.

Some important server monitoring best practices to consider that can help give you the visibility and control you need to effectively monitor the performance your infrastructure include:

• Server discovery: The first step is to ensure you’re monitoring your full range of servers, including servers from multiple vendors as well as cloud or virtual servers.
• Server metrics: You’ll want to ensure your server monitoring efforts are as efficient and thorough as possible. Choose the right metrics to monitor, like CPU, power supply, and more.
• Server alerts: An important part of server monitoring is setting up automated alerts. By configuring the thresholds or events triggering alerts, you can ensure you always have the insights you need to head off server issues.
• Applications: For a full view of your infrastructure, you should understand not only servers in isolation but how servers and applications perform together to create the end-user experience. For all the above server monitoring steps, you should consider the same for applications.

By using a server monitoring software program like SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, many of these processes can be automated using pre-built templates and are also customizable to allow you to gain deeper and more actionable sever monitoring insights.

Why is server monitoring important?

Server monitoring is important because it can allow you to catch system issues before they affect users as well as more easily resolve performance issues when they occur.

While manual server monitoring efforts can help you get ahead of some problems, server monitoring and reporting tools are designed to help you save time diagnosing and finding the causes of problems as they occur. With an effective server monitoring solution, you can better pinpoint where the issue originated, so you spend more time troubleshooting solutions and less time searching for causes.

What is server monitoring software?

Server monitoring software is built to provide metrics on the performance, availability, and health of servers and applications to help maximize performance and minimize downtime. Common resources server monitoring software typically tracks include RAM and CPU utilization, user load, response time, availability, and bandwidth consumption. Server monitoring solutions can help prevent server and application outages as well as optimize performance by monitoring various server components to deliver actionable insights.

What does server monitoring software do?

Server monitoring software can include the following features:

• Asset inventory: Building an accurate inventory relies on the polling of data across multiple nodes on your software at scheduled times. The data collected depends on the polling method you choose.
• Hardware health monitoring: Server monitoring software lets you collect details about hardware health not naturally available from server operating systems. With a tool, you can automatically monitor health across multiple nodes.
• Monitoring capabilities across environments and vendors, including monitoring of remote servers: A server monitoring solution can let you monitor servers both in the cloud and on-premises as well as different types of servers, including client servers, application servers, mail servers, FTP servers, proxy servers, and web servers. With a single tool capable of monitoring multiple vendors and types of servers, you can view all your most important metrics from a single server monitoring dashboard.
• Collection of key metrics for applications and servers: Server monitoring solutions are built to gather important metrics at preset intervals to provide insights into your network. With the help of built-in templates, these metrics can be specified based on what’s most relevant to the application or server.
• Analytic tools to help you understand metrics: Server monitoring systems not only provide real-time metrics, but they can also provide ways to better understand the significance of those metrics in context. By creating a historical baseline and tracking server monitoring performance over time, the tools can provide more meaningful insights into anomalies in your network.
• Real-time tracking: Server monitoring software is designed to provide performance metrics in real time to give you insights into the most vital statistics, including memory load, CPU load, disk queue, response time, and network throughput. The software can also give you real-time visibility into issues as they occur, with the ability to allow administrators to set thresholds and alerts to stay on top of performance problems.

How does server monitoring work in SAM?

Server monitoring is built to be easier with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. With SAM, you can feel safe knowing the tool is designed to deliver real-time, meaningful insights about your IT environment and can send alerts for problems. SolarWinds SAM is also designed to allow you to proactively work to solve issues before they affect your end users.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor lets you take control of the metrics you collect. SAM comes with intuitive out-of-the-box templates and template customization capabilities, so you can monitor both application and server performance in whatever way makes the most sense for your business. You can also set thresholds for sending predetermined alerts to be sent to administrators.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is built to provide a complete server monitoring solution and helps ensure you stay on top of your server and application performance, so you can deliver the best possible performance to users.