Server Monitoring Software: Three Questions To Ask
Before purchasing server monitoring software several questions have to be answered by a business to be able to pick the right software product. A few of these questions should be prioritized as they are the most important before picking software to monitor a data center or computer network.
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.
Good software monitoring scripts will allow for automatic reactions, e.g. calling scripts or running applications, that can gather additional important information or even initiate a repair. This might decrease the time the service, server or even network become unresponsive.
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.
Does the software contain trend analysis so future outages may be avoided? In the IT world, issues occur and hardware breaks but it is in the mitigation of these problems where production outages may be avoided.
The trend analysis can be an excellent source of information to assist the network administrators in the mitigation process as they can monitor the important parameters like cpu usage, hard drive storage capacities and computer memory utilization.
If a server continues to reboot, hang, blue-screen, etc. the server monitoring software will track the time of day and what things may be running at the time of the incident. A good monitor will also graph for you periods of time so you may visually see the high cpu spikes, the systematic memory climbs or where the hard drive spacing has been allocated.
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.