Uptime Monitor and Downtime Tracker Tool to Check Server Uptime

What is server uptime?

Server uptime is a key measurement of the functionality of your system. Server uptime refers to server status, which can indicate if it’s fully available and functional. When looking at sever health, uptime is defined by the availability of a website or domain or by the availability and reliability of devices and servers. It’s contrasted with server downtime, when a server is experiencing failures and isn’t available or useable. 

In the most basic terms, server uptime refers to when the system is working and is generally considered the default, whereas server downtime refers to when the system isn’t working. Downtime can be broken down into more specific definitions, since it can be intentional (such as downtime for system maintenance) or unintentional (like a crisis in the system or if there’s a malfunction or error causing the system to become unavailable).

How to check server uptime

Checking server uptime is important when determining if devices are performing as they should. In a large network, this understanding is also a critical part of monitoring server functionality and how they affect the availability of the services you use. 

While you can check server uptime manually, the more devices and nodes you have on your system, the more difficult checking server uptime across your environment can become. However, the basics of manually checking each server for its uptime are similar across operating systems: 

In Windows, you can check server uptime using either the net statistics server command or the systeminfo command. To use either of these commands, use the following steps:

1. On the command line, connect to your cloud server, which you can do through RDP.
2. Type either “net statistics server” or “systeminfo” and then press Enter.
3. Find the line beginning with “Statistics since” - this will indicate when the uptime started.

Another way to check server uptime in Windows is through the Task Manager:

1. Open the Task Manager by right-clicking on the task bar.
2. Click on the performance bar at the top, making sure you have SPU selected on the left side.
3. Toward the bottom of the screen, you will see the uptime listed.

In Linux, you can check server uptime by following these steps:

1. First, select Applications, then Accessories, then Terminal to open a command-line terminal.
2. From there, type the command “$ uptime”
3. The uptime command will then tell you the current time, how long the system has been running for, how many users are currently logged on, and the averages for the system load in the last 5, 10, and 15 minutes.

While it’s possible to check each server uptime manually, manual server uptime monitoring can be a tedious process, wasting both time and energy while producing few useful, applicable results. The breadth of information you can discover about your network when conducting manual uptime monitoring is far smaller than what you can gain using server uptime monitoring tools. 

Investing in server uptime monitoring software can help you make the most out of uptime monitoring insights. Using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, you can monitor server uptime across your environment with integrated templates designed to let you monitor over 1,200 applications, operating systems, and devices in your network to help make sure your systems and services are performing optimally.

How does server uptime monitoring work?

Server uptime monitoring consists of monitoring and measuring statistics and data across your environment, including hardware resources and health, services, and processes. One of the central components of server uptime monitoring is monitoring server hardware health and resources. This is because hardware bottlenecks can affect server and application uptime and server performance. 

The main metrics to watch when monitoring hardware health include:

• CPU load: High CPU utilization can indicate the server hardware isn’t performing optimally and needs to be upgraded or replaced.
• Virtual memory: With increases in virtual memory consumption, the physical disks in your system are put under intense pressure due to data constantly moving between RAM, those disks, and back to RAM, which can potentially lead to the disks fragmenting.
• Physical memory usage: Physical memory bottlenecks can be caused by paging, a method of controlling how memory resources are shared on a virtual or physical server.
• Disk performance: Disk latency, often due to an issue with storage performance, can also cause bottlenecks.
• Hardware health: The health of your hardware is central to the performance of your server. Monitoring key metrics like power supply, fan speed, and server temperature can help you stay on top of the health of your hardware and fix problems before they become critical, thus preventing system downtime.

Ideally, a server uptime tool can let you monitor application health alongside hardware health from a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. This information can then be used to gain insights about the performance of different aspects of your system health, so you can better understand the overall availability of your servers.

Why is uptime monitoring important?

Uptime monitoring helps ensure your system is performing as expected. It can also help you solve server performance problems as they come up—ideally before they have a serious impact on the productivity of end users.

Through system availability monitoring, you can aim to achieve high availability (HA) for the system. HA is defined as the ability of a system, or a component of a system, to remain functional for a substantial length of time. 

Monitoring processes and services is also an important component of server uptime monitoring. Stopped services and rogue processes can use up your server hardware resources without your knowledge, which can reduce your system performance. Monitoring uptime lets you find these resource hogs and stop them before they cause too much damage.

What does server uptime monitoring software do?

Server uptime monitoring tools are built to allow you to better protect the continued functionality of your business by helping you pinpoint problems in your system, whether in the hardware, website, or application on your network. An uptime monitor is designed to help you better prevent downtime and find the root causes of performance failures before they cause significant damage. Server monitoring software can also work as a downtime monitor tool or uptime tracker by constantly checking for any issues with an impact on performance, which can help you bring your downtime as close to zero percent as possible and maximize the availability of your system.

Depending on the server, the work done by an uptime monitor can look a little different. This includes:

• Application servers are monitored for server responsiveness and availability.
• Storage servers are monitored for availability, data loss, delay, and capacity.
• Web servers are monitored for security, user load, and speed.

Additionally, server uptime monitoring software can let you see how many users are trying to access your applications and servers at the same time during peak business hours. This can help you understand resource utilization and allocation, and if system resources are affecting the performance of your applications, so you can load balance appropriately. 

Server uptime monitoring software can also send real-time alerts when performance issues are first detected, which can help you determine if your services are providing the amount of uptime guaranteed by service level agreements.

How does uptime monitor work in SAM?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is built to monitor the pieces of your system necessary for maximizing uptime, including both hardware and software. SAM can help you find the root cause of a system failure by providing deep insights into your server to give you the information you need to act immediately, so you can solve it before end users are impacted. This includes indicating whether problems may be due to the web server needing more resources, an issue with the network, problems with the application, or any number of other potential causes. 

SAM also comes with the AppStack^™ dashboard, which can help you solve problems quickly by mapping dependencies across storage systems, applications, and physical and virtual servers to help you better understand complex environments. Using AppStack, you can pull in data like inbound and outbound network connections alongside SAM application monitoring metrics to achieve a more complete view of overall system health. SAM visualization benefits also include PerfStack^™, which lets you correlate data across a single chart by dragging, dropping, and stacking performance metrics to help you solve the most complex infrastructure problems.

SolarWinds SAM is designed to monitor every part of your system, including  IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications within Azure and AWS. SAM also lets you customize your server monitoring, so you can ensure you’re not overrun with unnecessary alerts, but instead get information on the issues affecting the specific needs of your system. While you can easily customize your server monitoring, SAM comes with over 1,200 pre-created application monitoring templates to help ensure you get real-time alerts whenever the uptime monitor detects a potential issue with your system. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is built to support your efforts to improve server uptime, so you can experience as close to the ideal 100% uptime as possible.