Updated June 8, 2023
Introduction to Server Monitoring Tools
For any IT organization maintaining its production environment is very critical, as any defect will hamper its operation to a great extent. The server are the main backbone of any organization, and monitoring them regularly is critical. The organization does spend hefty amounts on this task as they do not want unpredictable extended downtimes.
To have minimum downtime and obtain optimal performance from the website and other services, we need to constantly monitor the data center and other server infrastructure regularly and constantly. Thus to handle this monitoring, the server monitoring tools come in handy, and they monitor the CPU health, uptime, disk space, performance thresholds, etc.
Top Server Monitoring Tools
Server monitoring tools are very important in any organization to monitor the health of its infrastructure and ensure great customer service by providing fast and reliable services. To maintain this trust among its customers, the organization needs to employ better server monitoring tools to provide uninterrupted services. If there are any maintenance activities, the customers can be notified prior, and the activity needs to be completed in a defined SLA. A few popular tools include Datadog, Paessler PRTG, Nagios X1, Solar Winds Server and Application Monitoring Services, Zabbix, etc.
Let’s look in brief at some of the popular server monitoring tools below:
Here we will see about Datadog, PRTG, LogicMonitor, and Monitis.
1. Paessler PRTG
PRTG is a better and more popular server monitoring tool that can help monitor ever-distributed networks. PRTG will provide predefined sensors that can start monitoring right away. PRTG server monitoring tool can be used in monitoring various services, and below are a few.
- Mail Server Monitoring: Mail servers are one of the main critical servers that need constant monitoring, and PRTG is one of the efficient service providers. Any glitch in the mail server will be problematic, and these kinds of tools can be Popular sensors for mail server monitoring, including IMAP, POP3, SMTP, etc.
- Web Server Monitoring: This particular server can be the deciding factor for many organizations, and PRTG has different servers available for web server monitoring.
- Database Server Monitoring: The database is critical as it stores highly critical data. Also, the performance of the database is important. PRTG has effective sensors for this monitoring as well.
- File Server Monitoring: File server monitoring is again one of the critical tasks, and PRTG has efficient sensors for this task.
2. Datadog
Cloud-scale applications mainly use Datadog, which is the most popular monitoring service. Again as PRTG, this can be effectively used to monitor mail servers, web servers, database servers, file servers, etc. Datadog provides these features through a SaaS-based data analytics framework. During the latest release, Datadog incorporated open-source and closed-source technologies like Kafka, Cassandra, D3, PostgreSQL, etc., transitioning from its original Python implementation.
Datadog can support multiple cloud-based giants, including Amazon Web Services AWS, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, and Google Platform Cloud. Datadog has associated itself with over 350+ integrations. It has support for Windows, Linux, and Mac-based systems.
Some of the features of datalog have been listed below:
- Datadog provides a single view of the infrastructure to the IT or DevOps team so that the team is aware of the server infrastructure and its health.
- Datadog provides customizable dashboards, which make the metrics easily understood.
- The alert notification is one of the best features of Datadog, which helps track and resolve critical issues.
- Supports many integrations.
- It is efficient in analyzing logs to understand the latency and error rates.
- It supports many applications written in different languages: python, java, PHP, .NET, Go, Node, etc.
3. LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is again a popular network monitoring tool that provides high networking and other IT-related infrastructures visibility under one unified platform. Some of the best features of LogicMonitor are given below:
- It is easy to deploy and can be tested for free before deployment. The lightweight feature of LogicMonitor makes this possible.
- Provides coverage to most complex networks, which can spread to multiple data centers.
- LogicMonitor provides support to the software-defined networks with partner Cisco.
- Provide effective dashboard, topology mapping, elevated visibility for the tracking network, and server performances. This helps in identifying any anomaly in the performance trends of the infrastructure.
- The troubleshooting for the LogicMonitor is faster, and LogicMonitor also provides reduced alert noise.
4. Monitis
The Tag line from the Monitis official site says, “Take Your Sever Proframance To The Next Level”, and its popularity among organizations justifies this tag. The monitis server monitoring is relatively cost-effective and can monitor key performances in a much shorter time. Some of the better features of the monitis server monitoring tool are below:
- Provides broad visibility to the IT infrastructure.
- Since montis is cloud-based, we can monitor the performance from anywhere.
- Provides a simplified solution to all the monitoring requirements under one platform.
- The alert feature and the insightful reports from monitis ensure we always stay on top of the issues. This helps to sense that something is wrong and needs to be worked upon.
- It can be used for both Windows and Linux deployments.
- It covers disk, storage, CPU, website, and server health checks in its monitoring package.
Conclusion
Today the organization’s business depends on how stable and consistent the service they provide. Thus, business needs better infrastructure to provide consistent services and better monitoring tools so that the infrastructure, like networks and data centers’ health, is constantly monitored, and any abnormality can be caught quickly. Thus having minimum or no impact on the services to its clients. This article covers some popular tools to monitor your server with minimum manual interventions.
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This is a guide to Server Monitoring Tools. Here we discuss the introduction and top 4 monitoring tools of the server along with an explanation. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
