Server Monitoring Software: Three Questions To Ask
When considering server monitoring software there are many questions a business must understand before purchasing. These are just a few questions but should be at the top of your list when in the market to monitor the server environment or any device sitting in the data center.
One of the main questions is the capability of calling custom scripts to assist in the monitoring and alerting process. Many server monitoring applications alert a server technician when a defined scenario occurs but does not provide any means to process the issue further automatically.
A good software monitor can start additional applications, scripts, tasks and commands that can gather additional information and even try to fix the issue at hand automatically. This can cut the time it takes to fix the issue at hand drastically which is important for any business.
Usually multiple operating systems are used in a computer network and data center. This can be different kind of Linux servers, Windows desktop operating systems and other hardware and services like firewalls, routers, switches, printers, scanners and basically anything that can be connected and accessed in the network.
The entire server network and environment has to be considered that should be monitored by the server monitoring software to cover everything of importance. It is also best if certain standards are used by the software of choice to make it easier to switch software programs when necessary and to be able to analyze them in third party programs.
Trend analysis is another aspect that should be included in the software to project and avoid future outages. It is common that hardware needs to be replaced from time to time but the most time can be saved by reacting before severe outages occur.
Server monitoring software can be the perfect alliance to assist you in this mitigation considering it is the eyes and ears of the events, cpu usage, memory utilization, hard drive capacity and any other item tagged to be watched.
The monitoring software should be able to keep track of any configured and several default events and incidents that occur like reboots, hangs or blue screens. Graphs should be provided so that it becomes easier to track down cpu spikes, hard drive capacity issues, bandwidth limitations, memory climbs and other problems more easily.
Server monitoring software is one of the key applications for system administrators that aid them in the analysis of present and future networking and server issues. It is one of the foundations of any serious business that is utilizing a network.
