Server monitoring best practices

Server monitoring is conducted by administrators that handle the responsibility of surveilling server availability around the clock and keeping a tab on crucial application’s functioning, such as CPU, disk and memory monitoring. It’s vital for these administrators to be experts at monitoring the performance of your server, and how to deal with any issues that might pop up.

What is server monitoring essential?

Every organisation has servers built into the core of their network and business infrastructure, so any problems with the server can negatively and immensely affect the business and the revenue. Server monitoring helps provide availability. Server monitoring becomes absolutely vital when your servers are dispersed over many different locations, or your business has opted to employ both cloud servers as well as on-premise servers. Multi-layered environments like these make server monitoring admins absolutely crucial as it is important that the performance of these various servers is kept track of.

1. Maintain vigilance

To ensure optimum monitoring of your setup, you should make sure that it is put together properly as it is meant to be and is functional throughout the day. This will help guarantee that all the aspects of your configured setup are monitored to catch a problem before it becomes bigger. A perfectly configured solution installation requires your system to enable all the monitoring agents to keep an eye on it. If your monitoring is not around the clock, then it will be impossible to alert your support staff to take quick action to stop the problem from getting bigger.

Your monitoring solution should include monitoring 24/7 even if there is no discernable burden on the systems. There will always be instances when your system is not connected to anyone but it is still under load. These instances could include various elements such as undying the system, scanning for viruses and backups, structuring your database, which basically includes all the events you might not consider tracking because the service is usually automated. You need to be quickly updated if your system failed while conducting any of these functions.

2. Set a baseline

To begin with, define your server performance in daily life. It becomes easier to spot a problem when you know what normal functioning should look like on a daily or weekly basis. Ensure that you employ analysis that is system-level whole defining your measurements and baselines when entails taking the whole system into consideration, not just a single metric or element at a time. 

For example, if you notice that the utilisation of your CPU is off the charts, it does not necessarily mean that the problem lies with your CPU. Its high utilisation could be caused due to a different problem such as the memory, or hard disks that are the culprit behind your CPU flow-on problems. The baseline should not focus merely on singular elements or metrics but the sum total of daily interactions between the elements in your system. Plus, your baseline shouldn’t just measure usual performance in a vacuum, the focus should be on ideal performance. 

3. Avoid hand-rolling your solution

It is a well-known phenomenon in the IT sector to choose to build something that is your unique version, instead of utilizing things that are already in use within the market. Server monitoring is one thing in which you should not speculate whether to build it just buy a service from the best in the industry. It could cost you a lot of money to build an internal server monitoring tool for your confidential data.

You of course would never choose to write a logger from the beginning, or with the start of every project is to build a source control tool from scratch. You might also avoid putting together your own operating system or web server to take care of your work. These are terrible ideas to put into action. Nowadays, instead of building your own, you should research the ones already available in the market that are cost-effective and ready to use. So go for them.

4. Keep a tab on the server’s core usage

The server’s basic monitoring includes gathering data on drive space, usage of memory and CPU, as well as bandwidth. It lends a hand to network admins who ensure these particles to boost the IT performance of their company’s entire infrastructure. Server performance can be regularly monitored by IT technicians or administrators using cute monitoring. Hence, you can be alerted early on about possible problems being detected that could cause severe damage to your server performance. Other than visualisation of your performance, you can detect several problems as well as falling protocols using core monitoring.

Conclusion

Monitoring will be a piece of cake once you decide to enforce the monitoring practices mentioned above. This applies to operating systems, physical machines, and web applications.