The process of regularly observing and evaluating the functionality, accessibility, and general condition of computer servers within a network infrastructure is known as server monitoring.
It entails routinely observing numerous server metrics and characteristics to spot problems and potential bottlenecks and ensure that the servers operate at their best.
Monitoring a server usually entails monitoring variables such as CPU consumption, memory usage, disk space usage, network traffic, server response time, and application availability.
These measurements allow admins to spot faults, prevent downtime, and boost server performance. Server monitoring software automates the process, gathers data, generates alerts or notifications, and provides analytical information and reports for administrators to make intelligent decisions and take action.
How Server Monitoring Works?
Server monitoring uses various methods and technologies to collect data and continuously evaluate performance. Monitoring important data, examining logs, and producing alerts or notifications when abnormalities or problems are found are all part of the process.
Server monitoring tools are initially installed on monitored servers or network devices. These tools usually use agent-based or agentless methods. Agent-based monitoring uses small software agents on each server to collect and send data to a central server.
Instead, agentless monitoring remotely accesses server metrics via SNMP or WMI. Following configuration, monitoring tools collect data on CPU, RAM, disk space, network traffic, and other server characteristics.
Server monitoring tools monitor computer servers’ functionality, availability, and health. These systems allow managers to monitor several servers, gather data, analyze metrics, and send alerts or notifications when issues arise.
Tools for server performance monitoring have many features and capabilities. They can monitor CPU and memory consumption data, storage space, network traffic, server response time, application availability, and other metrics.
Agent-based and agentless monitoring solutions collect data from servers and network devices. The data is processed and reviewed in real-time or at predefined intervals and compared to baselines or thresholds.
The monitoring tool sends administrators an alarm or warning when a measure exceeds predetermined limits or deviates from expected patterns.
Choosing the best server monitoring tool requires careful consideration of various factors to ensure it meets your specific requirements and aligns with your organization’s needs. Here are some key considerations to help you pick the best server monitoring tool:
Define your monitoring goals: The first step should clearly state your priorities and objectives. Determine the most critical metrics and parameters you wish to track, the level of detail needed, and any unique compliance or regulatory requirements that must be satisfied.
Scalability and flexibility: Check the monitoring tool’s capacity for expansion. Examine its capacity to manage your current server infrastructure and allow growth.
Ease of use and user interface: Analyze the tool’s general usability and user interface. It must have a user-friendly layout, straightforward navigation, and neatly arranged dashboards.
Alerting and notification capabilities: Examine the tool’s alerting and notification capabilities. You should be able to establish thresholds, configure alerts, and select your preferred notification type (email, SMS, etc.).
Data collection and analysis: Analyze the tool’s capacity for gathering data. It should be able to collect, examine, and deliver real-time or nearly real-time insights from various server metrics.
Integration and compatibility: Consider the tool’s integration capabilities with other IT management systems and third-party applications.
Support and documentation: Consider the vendor’s technical assistance and documentation level. Ensure they provide thorough manuals, knowledge bases, training materials, and discussion forums.
Cost and Licensing: Analyze the tool’s licensing and pricing policies. Check whether it fits your budget and provides the essential features within your spending limits.
Nagios: Provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services.
Zabbix: Offers real-time monitoring, alerting, and visualization for network devices, servers, and applications.
Prometheus: Open-source system monitoring with a powerful query language and built-in alerting.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor: Tracks performance and availability of servers and applications.
Datadog: Cloud-based monitoring with real-time observability for infrastructure, applications, and logs.
PRTG Network Monitor: Monitors network performance, devices, bandwidth, and server health.
New Relic: Provides detailed performance monitoring and diagnostics for applications and infrastructure.
Dynatrace: AI-powered monitoring for applications, infrastructure, and user experience.
ManageEngine: Unified monitoring for servers, networks, applications, and cloud services.
Cacti: All-in-one network monitoring solution for bandwidth, uptime, and performance.
10 Server Monitoring ToolsFeaturesStand Alone FeaturePricingFree Trial / Demo1. Nagios1. Monitoring
2. Alerting
3. Event management
4. Performance visualizationExtensive plugin support for various monitoring needs.$1,995 – $5,995No2. Zabbix1 Web tracking
2. Monitoring with SNMP
3. Application tracking
4. Dashboards that can be customizedUnified monitoring for networks, servers, and applications.Open-source, freeYes3. Prometheus1. Collection of time series data
2. Scraping and storing metrics
3. Metrics scraping and storage
4. System of alerts and notificationsTime-series data collection with powerful querying.Open-source, freeNo4. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor1. Application performance monitoring (APM)
2. Infrastructure Surveillance
3. Analytics and reporting in real time
4. EUM stands for end-user monitoring.Comprehensive application performance management.Starts at $2,995Yes5. Datadog1. Infrastructure Monitoring
2. Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
3. Log Management
4. Real User Monitoring (RUM)
5. Network Performance MonitoringReal-time monitoring with advanced analytics.$15 per host/monthYes6. PRTG Network Monitor1. Server and application monitoring
2. Monitoring performance in real-time
3. Real-time performance monitoring
4. Reporting and dashboardsVersatile, customizable sensors for all devices.Starts at $1,750Yes7. New Relic1. Application performance monitoring (APM)
2. Infrastructure Surveillance
3. Analytics and reporting in real-time
4. EUM stands for end-user monitoring.Full-stack observability for applications and infrastructure.Starts at $99/monthYes8. Dynatrace1. User monitoring in real time
2. User experience tracking
3. Browser tracking
4. Performance metrics trackingAI-driven automated root cause analysis.Starts at $69/monthYes9. ManageEngine1. Endpoint administration
2. Patch administration
3. Management of mobile devices
4. Remote access and controlIntegrated monitoring and IT management solution.$945 for 10 serversYes10. Cacti1. Custom sensor design
2. Virtualization tracking
3. Database surveillance
4. Connection to other systems and toolsAll-in-one monitoring with an intuitive interface.Starts at $1,750Yes
1. Nagios
Nagios
Nagios is an open-source server monitoring tool that comprehensively monitors network services, host resources, and network infrastructure, ensuring high availability and performance of critical IT systems.
It offers real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities, allowing administrators to detect and resolve issues quickly, minimizing downtime, and ensuring business continuity.
Nagios is highly customizable and scalable, supporting many plugins and integrations. This makes it suitable for diverse environments and complex monitoring requirements.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Nagios can monitor various resources, including servers, network devices, applications, services, and environmental factors.
Nagios is a versatile configuration architecture that allows you to design custom monitoring checks and thresholds based on your needs.
It provides powerful alerting and notification capabilities to inform system administrators of faults and possible problems.
Nagios offers a web-based interface for seeing the status of your monitored services, acknowledging alerts, scheduling downtime, and performing administrative duties.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Proven and established1. Configuration complexity2. Customizable and extensible:2. User interface3. Flexibility3. User interface4. Alerting and notifications4. Lack of advanced features
2. Zabbix
Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source server monitoring tool that provides comprehensive monitoring and analytics for various network services, servers, and hardware, ensuring proactive issue detection and resolution.
It offers robust features such as real-time monitoring, alerting, and visualization, enabling administrators to maintain high availability and performance of their IT infrastructure through detailed metrics and trends.
Zabbix supports a wide range of platforms and is highly customizable. It allows integration with numerous third-party solutions and the ability to scale from small environments to large enterprise networks.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Zabbix can monitor various resources, such as servers, virtual machines, network devices, applications, and services.
It includes an auto-discovery function that automatically finds and adds new devices or services to the monitoring environment.
Zabbix has a web-based interface that includes customized dashboards and visualizations.
You can configure customizable alerting and notification rules in Zabbix based on predefined thresholds or custom triggers.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Proven and established1. Configuration complexity:2. Customizable and extensible:2. User interface:3. Flexibility3. Scalability challenges:4. Alerting and notifications:4. Lack of advanced features
3. Prometheus
Prometheus
Prometheus is a free and open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit for collecting and analyzing time series data. It uses a pull-based architecture to periodically retrieve metric data from targets over HTTP or other supported protocols.
The Prometheus server is the system’s heart, collecting, storing, and analyzing metric data. Users may obtain and alter metrics data for analysis and visualization using Prometheus’ strong query language, PromQL.
Prometheus also provides alerting based on specified rules. Prometheus provides a reliable and adaptable monitoring solution for contemporary distributed systems and microservices architectures.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Prometheus captures time series data from targets that are being watched.
It uses a multi-dimensional data model, allowing users to label time series data with key-value pairs (labels).
Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) is a flexible language for querying and manipulating time series data.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Powerful monitoring and alerting1. Storage limitations2. Scalability2. Complexity for large-scale setups3. Flexibility and extensibility3. Lack of native high availability:4. Pull-based model4. Resource requirements:
4. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is an all-in-one monitoring solution for complex IT systems that gives insights into the performance and availability of servers, apps, and infrastructure.
Its agentless architecture employs industry-standard protocols, including SNMP, WMI, and PowerShell, to collect data from servers and applications. SAM provides real-time monitoring, displaying performance metrics and status in intuitive dashboards, graphs, and charts.
It also enables capacity planning by analyzing historical data trends and providing predictive insights. SAM supports automation and remediation by integrating with other SolarWinds tools, allowing administrators to execute scripts or perform actions to resolve issues remotely.
Why Do We Recommend It?
SAM provides comprehensive monitoring features for real and virtual servers, allowing you to track key performance parameters such as CPU consumption, memory utilization, disk I/O, and network traffic.
It can detect and map dependencies between applications and the underlying infrastructure components on which they rely.
It allows you to configure thresholds and warnings based on established or customized performance measures.
SAM includes extensive prepackaged application templates for commonly used programs, databases, and web servers.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Comprehensive monitoring1. Cost2. Ease of use2. Complexity for advanced configurations3. Scalability3. Resource requirements4. Alerting and notifications4. Limited customization
5. Datadog
Datadog is a powerful server monitoring tool designed to provide comprehensive visibility into the performance and health of servers and applications.
It works by deploying agents on servers, collecting a wide range of metrics, storing and processing the data in a distributed backend infrastructure, and providing a centralized web interface for visualizing and analyzing the metrics, setting up alerts, and leveraging advanced monitoring capabilities.
With its intuitive interface and extensive visualization options, Datadog enables users to create customizable dashboards, set up automated alerts, and collaborate effectively across teams, enhancing visibility and operational efficiency across the entire IT environment.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Datadog monitors the health and performance of your infrastructure, including servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud services.
The APM capabilities of Datadog assist you in monitoring and analyzing the performance of your applications.
Datadog can collect, aggregate, and analyze logs from various sources.
Datadog uses RUM to capture and analyze user interactions with your applications, helping you better understand the user experience.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Comprehensive monitoring1. Cost2. Real-time visibility2. Learning curve3. AIOps and machine learning:3. Limited log management features4. Customizable dashboards and visualizations4. Resource consumption
6. PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor is an all-in-one network monitoring solution that gives you insight and control over your network’s infrastructure, devices, and applications.
It collects real-time performance data and metrics using monitoring technologies such as SNMP, WMI, NetFlow, and packet sniffing.
It provides a variety of predefined sensors for monitoring various characteristics of network devices and applications, such as bandwidth use, CPU and memory utilization, reaction times, and service availability.
PRTG’s scalability enables administrators to monitor small to extensive networks and offers remote monitoring, allowing them to monitor scattered settings.
Why Do We Recommend It?
PRTG can monitor many network devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, servers, etc.
PRTG includes bandwidth monitoring features that allow you to monitor and analyze network traffic.
It allows you to construct visual maps of your network infrastructure, displaying network device interactions and dependencies.
PRTG allows you to configure custom performance metric thresholds and triggers.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Ease of use1. Cost2. Scalability2. Steep learning curve3. Comprehensive monitoring capabilities3. Resource-intensive4. Customization and flexibility:4. Customization limitations
7. New Relic
New Relic
New Relic Server Monitoring is a real-time tool designed to monitor server performance and health. It uses a lightweight agent on each server to collect metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network traffic, and process activity.
It also provides alerting capabilities, historical data storage and analysis, trend analysis, capacity planning, and troubleshooting of server-related issues.
It simplifies the monitoring and management of server infrastructure, ensuring optimal performance and minimizing downtime.
Why Do We Recommend It?
New Relic’s APM features are extensive, allowing you to monitor your apps’ performance in real-time.
With New Relic, you can monitor the health and performance of your servers, virtual machines, containers, and other infrastructure components.
We can use this capability to replicate user interactions with your applications from various geographical areas.
You can track the performance of your mobile applications across several platforms and devices with New Relic’s mobile monitoring features.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Comprehensive monitoring1. Cost2. Application-centric focus2. Complexity for Beginners3. Easy to use3. Limited Data Retention4. integration and ecosystem4. Integration Challenges
8. Dynatrace
Dynatrace
Dynatrace provides full-stack monitoring with automatic discovery and mapping of all dependencies, ensuring comprehensive visibility across complex cloud environments and delivering real-time insights for proactive issue resolution.
The platform leverages AI-driven analytics to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and provide actionable insights, helping IT teams resolve performance issues quickly and maintain optimal application performance.
Dynatrace integrates seamlessly with a wide range of technologies and platforms, offering flexible deployment options and supporting continuous delivery pipelines to enhance the efficiency and reliability of software development and operations.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Dynatrace gives a complete insight into your technological stack, including applications, microservices, containers, cloud infrastructure, and more.
Dynatrace’s APM capabilities enable you to monitor the performance of your applications across several programming languages and frameworks.
It provides infrastructure monitoring for servers, virtual machines, cloud platforms, and containers.
Dynatrace records and analyzes user interactions with your applications, allowing you to gain insights into real-world user experiences.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Deep Application Visibility1. Cost2. Automatic Discovery and Dependency Mapping2. Learning Curve3. AI-Powered Root Cause Analysis3. Complexity of Configuration4. Scalability and Cloud Native Support4. Dependency on Agent Deployment
9. ManageEngine
ManageEngine
The ManageEngine server monitoring tool is a comprehensive solution for monitoring the performance and availability of servers in IT infrastructures.
It operates by deploying agents on the servers to collect real-time data and metrics related to CPU usage, memory utilization, disk performance, network traffic, and more. The tool simplifies setup by providing pre-configured monitoring templates for various server platforms and applications.
With its user-friendly interface and extensive features, ManageEngine server monitoring solutions simplify server management, improve performance, and ensure the availability of your critical server infrastructure.
Why Do We Recommend It?
ManageEngine offers network monitoring solutions that enable you to monitor the health and performance of your network infrastructure.
ITSM solutions from ManageEngine help firms streamline and automate their IT service delivery operations.
It allows you to monitor the performance of your IT environment’s servers and applications.
ManageEngine provides help desk and ticketing tools to assist IT companies in managing and resolving support requests.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Comprehensive Suite of Tools1. Complexity for advanced configurations2. User-friendly interface:2. Limited customization options3. Integration capabilities3. Support limitations4. Scalability
10. Cacti
Cacti is an open-source network monitoring and graphing tool designed for visualizing time-series data of network devices. It offers a robust and user-friendly interface for tracking performance metrics.
It leverages the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality, allowing users to create custom data sources and graphs for detailed performance monitoring and trend analysis.
Cacti supports a range of templates and plugins, making it highly customizable and extensible for various network monitoring needs, from small home networks to large enterprise environments.
Why Do We Recommend It?
Cacti offers comprehensive network graphing, allowing for detailed visualization of network performance metrics and historical data analysis, making it easier to identify trends and anomalies.
It supports a wide range of data sources and devices, making it highly versatile for monitoring diverse network environments and ensuring the coverage of all critical systems.
The tool is open-source and highly customizable, enabling users to tailor it to specific monitoring needs without incurring additional costs, fostering flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
Pros and Cons
ProsCons1. Open-source and cost-effective.1. Can be complex to configure.2. Highly customizable with various plugins.2. Limited real-time alerting features.3. Comprehensive graphing and visualization capabilities.3. Performance can degrade with large datasets.
