We attach great importance to the permanent, high-frequency, and precise monitoring of the servers we care for. This enables us to identify errors on the computers quickly and clearly and, in most cases, immediately identify the cause. Server monitoring often allows us to spot problems before they become real errors. A typical example of this is monitoring the filling level of a hard disk partition. In this article, we look at server monitoring and explain why it should be an integral part of IT operations in a company. In addition, we will look at some server monitoring best practices.
Servers perform a very wide range of functions. They host databases, firewalls, backups, applications, and web services. When you consider how many roles your server can play (and how many of those threads might be running simultaneously), it becomes clear that monitoring a server goes beyond just monitoring its availability.
Server monitoring can therefore mean keeping an eye on several elements, including:
Of course, you can only keep track of some of these dynamic elements by logging into each server, assembling, searching, and analyzing the records manually, or running diagnostic software. Even the centralized monitoring of each component (e.g., one for the hardware, one for the operating system, and another for the application) is quickly becoming impossible.
An integrated monitoring solution that covers all factors affecting the overall health of your system would be ideal. Such a solution would automatically communicate with your servers using standard protocols that collect data or are fed by agents installed on the servers. It would collect the logs, metrics, events, and traces from the target servers in real time, saves space, and index them for easy search and analysis or visualization via dashboards. Also, the solution could send real-time alerts to the responsible team once an issue is detected.
That is the job of server monitoring tools.
When mission-critical servers run complex workloads, you can’t leave their day-to-day operations to chance. When the database server powering your ecommerce site goes down or slows down, customers get annoyed and abandon their transactions.
Legal obligations can no longer be met if technology fails, as they often require a reliable and secure infrastructure. Achieving regulatory compliance depends on fully understanding your server environment and implementing robust, proactive monitoring that can adapt to changes.
Malware and ransomware attacks are common and constant threats today. Knowing the current threat landscape and how your system can respond to such attacks is important to security preparedness. However, with a good overview of the health of your servers, you can adequately prepare. A good monitoring solution can provide here. A surveillance system can immediately understand when and why an unusual event occurred. For example, it can show whether peak loads occurred due to increased user demand or whether malicious system processes were responsible. Security monitoring components such as antivirus, Data loss prevention (DLP), and host intrusion detection systems (HIDS) can protect you from cyberattacks. SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems are – perhaps – the ultimate beneficiaries of modern surveillance solutions, as they provide multiple returns.
Only by truly monitoring all of the servers can you know whether a particular problem requires a restart, a process termination, a capacity upgrade, or a more robust failover mechanism. Proactive planning and implementation based on such feedback can go a long way toward avoiding server downtime and meeting your customers’ SLAs. A solid monitoring system can help you baseline operations to predict future capacity needs and anticipate the need for immediate upgrades, replacements, and additional automation.
Given the complexity of infrastructure environments consisting of hundreds or thousands of servers, there are a few key points to consider in your monitoring regime.
As a first step, making an accurate and up-to-date inventory of your entire server fleet is important. Also, make sure you categorize them correctly. Which servers and components are critical? Which software should be given the highest priority?
As the technical or commercial person responsible for each server, define the following points as well as possible:
The technical and commercial managers know their systems best. For example, they should also decide which error logs and server status codes to monitor closely and profile the metrics with clear and workable thresholds. You also know how often everything should be updated. If they don’t provide this information, you can decide what to monitor on those systems and communicate it to stakeholders.
A monitoring tool must be compatible with the target infrastructure. For example, you don’t use a Windows monitoring solution to monitor your Linux servers. Therefore, the monitoring solution should cover various server hardware options, network topologies, operating systems, and applications.
The metrics servers generate in a complex environment can quickly amount to terabytes of data. The solution of your choice must be able to collect, process, store, and analyze this massive amount of data. In some cases, SaaS solutions are ideal for this.
The dashboards of your monitoring solution should be easy to navigate, understand and interpret and, for example, be able to derive and display trends and anomalies from historical data. In addition, they should provide the ability to define alert thresholds for detected anomalies and deviations from accepted baselines. Once identified, the solution should send alerts to the server monitoring team and create a ticket in your service management system – preferably automatically. Some monitoring solutions take this further by allowing you to trigger remediation actions based on playbooks directly from their interfaces.
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