Servers are so inherent for all businesses that the server market grew by an exponential 19.8 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Servers allow businesses to store their data and share certain resources and equipment. For this reason, server monitoring is imperative to avoid downtime and other failure issues.
On average, an IT downtime could cost your business about $140,000 per hour on the low end. If you’re running a high-level data transaction business, like an e-commerce store, you stand to lose as much as $540,000 per hour. You’ll also have to deal with other indirect costs such as business interruption.
One of the best ways to avoid these problems is through proper server monitoring. Servers are the bedrock of your business, and you need to keep your eye on performance indicators to prevent problems. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about server monitoring.
What Makes Server Monitoring So Important?
Servers are usually distributed across various physical locations. They operate in hybrid setups that mix cloud-based solutions and premise servers.
This could make it hard for the system administrators to know exactly what’s going on in the networks. One of the most critical functions of server monitoring is getting notifications when issues occur with the servers.
With this information, you can act immediately and remedy the situation to avoid bigger problems and high losses. Server monitoring can be either proactive to issues that are about to develop or reactive to issues that have already occurred in the past. It’ll give you an overview of all your systems on the unified dashboard.
With server monitoring, your decision-making skills will be empowered. You’ll know exactly what kind of issues keep happening and which ones happen spontaneously.
Once you have an understanding of the kind of issues to expect, then you’re able to make the right decisions in the future. In turn, you can avoid frequent problems and minimize any chances of downtime.
Server monitoring will help you track the accessibility of the server. It’ll help you track performance, security, low storage capacity, and CPU and memory usage. Read on to find out the best server monitoring practices.
Understand Your Server’s Capabilities and Capacity
Server monitoring or network monitoring is easier when you know what you’re working with. The first thing you have to do is check what normal performance is like.
Make sure you monitor the whole system and not just one metric. It’ll be hard for you to spot any server problems when you don’t know what a typical day looks like for your servers.
Once you understand the standard patterns, you can detect any changes that will be an indication of trouble. This will make it easy for you to isolate the problem and take any necessary actions immediately.
Defining your server baseline is also imperative. It’ll provide you with early indicators when your servers are clocking available capacity. This information is critical because you’ll know when to upgrade or scale.
Monitor the Core Usage of Your Servers
Monitoring the core usage of your service involves collecting memory usage, CPU usage, drive space, as well as bandwidth. This is one of the best servers monitoring practices.
It’ll help your network administer traitors to maintain high-performance infrastructure for your business. It’ll also allow your IT technicians to get a clear view of server performance at all times.
One of the best things about call monitoring is that you get fast detection of protocol failures and server offenses. You also get early warning signs on issues that may track the performance of your servers.
Track Key Metrics
Tracking key metrics is essential for monitoring a server. You can tell when measurements change significantly. You can pinpoint problems and troubleshoot before things get out of hand.
The best part is that there are numerous server monitoring software programs you can use to track and monitor your server metrics.
A server monitoring software program will give you insights into essential server performance measurements. These measurements are essential. They could be related to packet loss, response time, memory and disk capacity, hardware failures, among others.
Use Proper Server Monitoring Tools
Apart from software programs, there’s also a wide array of server monitoring tools that can help you achieve your goals. Using proper monitoring tools is vital as you can spot and troubleshoot problems quickly and efficiently. Now, there are different types of server monitoring tools.
Some will monitor metrics on a basic level. Others will offer you a comprehensive and broader application and network monitoring.
Define Exclamation Matrix
A considerable number of businesses spend a lot of money on sophisticated monitoring software. However, they still end up with serious server problems. The thing is, these server monitoring tools work like early alarms to alert you when there’s a problem and help you identify what kind of problem it is.
However, it’s of absolute importance that you take immediate action once you identify the problems. An escalation matrix is a solution that helps you define who to contact when various problems arise.
It could be your in-house IT technicians or third-party contractors. They should be available to rectify the problem promptly. Having a server monitoring service such as sevone.com can also go a long way if you find the task too much work.
Perform Configuration Management
If you want to save a lot of time with your server configuration management, then use profile-based configuration. When it comes to corporate IT infrastructure, every system has individual-level roles assigned. The systems, however, have shared properties, something you should take advantage of.
Try to create multiple authentication profiles depending on role requirements. This will help you minimize repetitive tasks and help you create high-performance IT infrastructures at the same time.
The Importance of Server Monitoring: Server Monitoring Best Practices
With servers monitoring, your server admin will stay on top of issues that may occur and cause downtime. Servers monitoring will help you ensure that your servers are continually up and running at all times. It’ll help you achieve fast remediation whenever there is an issue.
With proper server monitoring tools, you will have all critical performance metrics in a single dashboard. Pinpointing issues will be quick and efficient.
For more informative content, please head over to our blog section. We have so much more helpful and valuable content for our esteemed visitors.
Read Also:7 Tips on Choosing Antivirus Protection for Your Laptop
