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What are the Best Practices of Server Monitoring?

Monitoring your server is the practice of gaining insight into their activities. A server is a device that stores and processes information that is made available to other devices, applications, or users on request. One server can handle hundred or thousand requests. To ensure that all of an organization’s servers are operating according to its expected performance levels, it is important to manage them properly.

Server monitoring is extremely broad because there are many different types of servers. A virtual server might refer to a physical hardware box, but it increasingly refers to one that houses several independent servers from multiple machines connected. Servers include mail servers, web servers, databases, and printers. These serve different purposes, but they’re all part of the overall infrastructure for running a business smoothly.

In this article, we will discuss some of the most common types of server monitoring solutions available today. We will also look at how each one works.

What is Server Monitoring?

Server monitoring is a vital part of managing your server infrastructure. In addition to keeping track of hardware failures, it helps you identify potential problems before they become serious.

Servers are essential components of modern IT infrastructures and provide services such as email, web hosting, database management, and other applications. If you run a large organization or company, chances are you have servers, at least some of them.

Monitoring servers is important because it lets you detect problems early, preventing downtime and data loss. There are several ways to monitor server performance, from simple tools to complex solutions.

How does Server Monitoring Work?

The exact workflow for monitoring servers will depend on your choice of server monitoring software and the cloud-based servers you wish to monitor. As your business grows in size and complexity, you’ll need to choose and configure a server monitoring system that collects data from each cloud-based system. The general process of monitoring servers can be broken down into five steps:

Identify the most important KPI

Server monitoring begins with identifying what information you wish to collect from each server. Your decisions here depend upon the server’s functionalities for your business. You may choose availability and performance as critical metrics for an application server. For a web server, you might consider capacity and response times the most important factors. You may focus on a database server’s latency, throughput, and reliability.

Set baseline KPI values

Once you’ve determined which KPIs are most important, the next thing to do is measure each service’s performance (or lack thereof) on each key performance indicator (KPI). This initial measurement will act as a baseline against the future performance of the services.

Configure data collection and analysis

A server monitoring tool should be configured to collect data from the servers deployed within your cloud environment. Server monitoring tracks the activity on the servers by streaming event logs or logs files. Log files contain information regarding errors, user activity, and any security events that occur on the server.

A server monitoring tool tracks the server’s health and operating system KPIs such as CPU and memory availability, networking connectivity, and disk performance.

Set up comprehensive and specific alerts

You’ve configured your data collection and analysis. The next step is building an alert system that’ll notify you and your team when KPIs fall below thresholds.

Get ready to respond

Finally, you’ll need to establish policies and procedures for handling events. Who is responsible for finding solutions to problems? How do you respond to an alert? What types of alerts require action? It would help if you answered these questions before defining how your company handles notifications.

Why is Server Monitoring Important?

Servers are one of the most important components of your IT infrastructure, and monitoring their availability and reliability is vital for keeping your business functioning smoothly. If a web or file service is unavailable, slow, having downtime, or otherwise performing poorly, you might end up losing potential clients. If an internal database is having trouble storing or retrieving information, you could lose crucial business information that can be lost forever.

Monitoring a system ensures that it responds correctly and efficiently and provides information about how the software performs. A good example would be watching a website to see if it loads quickly, and another is checking out log activity to ensure no unusual occurrences occur.

A third might be checking emails to ensure they are arriving appropriately, and a fourth could be checking data to see if any errors exist.

While not being able to measure them, it probably has little business value.

What are the Types of Server Monitoring?

Let’s take a closer look at the various types of server monitoring software. Different types are available as a function of what they do, and you can better understand what to look out for.

Availability/Uptime Monitoring

Availability/uptime is the single most important metric of server monitoring, and other metrics may matter if the server is inaccessible or otherwise unavailable. Server availability/uptime monitoring keeps track of the server to ensure it’s working properly and responding to requests sent to the server.

The possible reasons for unavailability are varied. Perhaps a systems administrator tripped on a networking cable or power cord inside the data center that he did not notice, or somebody deliberately turned off the server for hardware repair or maintenance but forgot to warn users.

Performance Monitoring

Keeping track of uptimes is crucial, and it’s important that your users can reach your servers whenever needed. However, uptime and availability are the bare minimum of server monitoring.

Performance monitoring will let you keep track of all the issues discussed. Performance evaluation ensures applications start quickly and respond to user requests as expected.

Resource Monitoring

A server is not one single component; instead, it consists of multiple parts. Monitoring of the server should focus on the performance of these components. Hard Disk, RAM, and Processor are the three main components of a server.

Effective resource monitoring is an important part of any IT infrastructure. You can monitor your servers’ temperatures and voltages to see how they’re doing. But effective resource monitoring goes beyond just those two items, and it also includes disk space usage, memory utilization, CPU load, network bandwidth, and much more. With this information, you’ll know whether your servers are running smoothly and efficiently or if something needs to be fixed.

Error Monitoring

Errors are inevitable. Whether they’re caused by users entering invalid data, applications not saving data to databases, or conflicts between multiple systems, errors will happen. However, you should be worried about a sudden increase in the number of errors occurring.

Error monitoring systems will notify administrators when the frequency or type of errors deviates from the usual pattern.

Log Monitoring

Server logs can provide valuable information about what is happening on your servers, and application logs can help identify problems with applications running on your servers. Monitoring these types of logs can help you determine if something terrible happened on one of your servers.

For best results, log files should be stored centrally. That speeds up the logging process since the software doesn’t have to access the log file remotely.

Database Monitoring

Database monitoring is keeping track of important performance metrics that give insight into how well your databases perform. These metrics include response times, availability, throughput, and memory usage. Tracking these metrics over time allows you to identify trends and patterns that help you decide what changes to make to your systems.

A good database monitoring strategy includes collecting data from various sources, including logs, event handlers, and third-party tools. This allows you to analyze everything happening in your environment while giving you access to historical information that helps you understand how your systems work together.

The key is to find out where the bottlenecks occur in your architecture and design solutions to address those issues. For example, if your database is running slowly because there aren’t enough resources to handle requests, consider adding additional servers or moving some workloads onto another server. If your database is responding slowly because of too much load, you might look for ways to reduce the amount of traffic being handled by your applications.

Security Monitoring

The types of monitoring that we’ve discussed thus far relate to issues that occur unintentionally. However, certain system issues are caused by the deliberate actions of users, malware, or third parties, which may put your data, systems, or business at risk.

The default solution to server security issues is installing an anti-malware program. However, anti-malware alone won’t protect your server against malicious threats. A good security monitoring program will not only detect malware but will also watch for unusual system and user activities.

Best Practices of Server Monitoring

The main takeaway should be that a well-thought-out monitoring plan using server monitoring best practices, if implemented correctly, can save an organization from serious problems. Here are some of these best practices:

Define the Normal

Creating a baseline for defining acceptable behavior is the first step in developing an effective performance monitoring strategy.

To create a baseline, you must define what normal behavior for your servers is. Deviations from these normal behaviors should be considered warning signs. When an administrator sees a deviation from the normal, they can isolate the problem and take appropriate action.

Monitor Core Usage on the Server

Core monitoring involves gathering metrics from various devices, including CPUs, Drives, RAM, and bandwidth. It’s an excellent practice because it helps IT administrators keep their networks running at peak performance levels.

Core monitoring allows IT managers to monitor their servers’ performance at any time easily. Consequently, they can spot potential issues before they cause serious damage to the servers.

Apart from visualizing performance metrics, real-time analysis allows quick detection of system issues and network errors.

Define Escalation Matrix

An escalation matrix determines who should handle what type of problem. Typically, the IT department handles technical issues, and outside vendors handle business issues. Having an escalation matrix can help prevent small problems from becoming larger ones and ensure that issues are handled quickly so they don’t become unmanageable.

Generate & Monitor Regular Reports

It is important to realize that you need more than knowing whether your server is performing according to plan is required, and you should be concerned with ensuring that your system usually functions as well.

While busy working on your priority IT tasks, you may need to remember the need to adjust monitoring parameters to match the changing needs. Setting up one or more reports to send to your email box daily can help remind you of the latest server performance results and trends.

Perform Configuration Management

Using profiles-based configuration for your Server Configuration Management (SCM) can save you time and trouble.

Each system within a corporate IT infrastructure has its own role, but they share certain commonalities. Use these similarities to your advantage. Create multiple user accounts based on the role requirements and then change those users’ settings. Once that is done, you can easily monitor the changes made to each account. Because these accounts share common properties, your monitoring system will detect the changes automatically.

Profile-based configuration Management is adopted for server monitoring practices in several enterprises across the globe to help reduce repetitive tasks and create a high-performance IT architecture.

Ensure high availability through Failover

Even after you have designed your system for robust performance, it may still experience downtime.

When this occurs, both your monitoring tool and your network likely fail. After all, the two are also parts of your infrastructure. This makes high availability among the most important components of a successful server performance monitoring strategy for any enterprise with fewer than several servers.

To ensure that your monitoring tools remain operational during any network outage, you should ensure they are highly available. A highly available monitoring solution means that if one component fails, another takes over seamlessly without interrupting service.

Maintain Historical Context

Server performance monitoring is an important aspect of any IT infrastructure. However, keeping track of old problems can be difficult. By learning from the past, you can avoid repeating them. Maintaining historical context should be a key component of your server performance monitoring plan.

The historical context of an issue can provide insight into how to solve it. Understanding the problem allows us to plan and decide how to best address it.

In Conclusion, Server Monitoring is critical to managing your IT infrastructure. The proper monitoring approach can help you identify potential issues before they become major headaches.

By using the above-mentioned best practices, you’ll be able to manage your server performance effectively.