Server monitoring goes much further than simply keeping an eye on how your equipment is running; it involves tracking performance, remediating issues, identifying trends and reporting out on what you find. Whether you’re monitoring servers, applications, clouds, or networks, you’re really managing your company’s critical infrastructure.
Here’s what you need to know about server monitoring.
Server Monitoring 101
STEP 1 – The server monitoring process starts with a basic health check of your systems:
- CPUs
- Disks
- Memory
- Event logs
- Network
Once these components are verified as healthy, you can establish a baseline and start monitoring metrics to identify characteristics that indicate the system is unhealthy. After all, knowing is half the battle.
STEP 2 – Identifying business critical systems and the servers on which they reside. These are the servers you will monitor on a granular level with more severe alerting parameters.
STEP 3 – Finally, you can define the characteristics of each business critical application and the application/system owners who should be notified when the monitoring trends vary from the baseline.
Why Monitoring Is Important
- Immediate notification of irregular functionality for critical applications and systems
- Maintain stability by initiating corrective action at the first sign of irregularity
- Real-time reporting on performance, capacity, security, and availability trends and other business-critical metrics
- Informed decisions on deployment of infrastructure and IT budget planning
Where To Start
A local technology partner can help set up a customized IT solution and monitoring system for your business, but the general process includes these steps:
- Assess your environment: reliability, performance, and leading practices configuration
- System review and infrastructure alignment with business units
- Evaluate server monitoring solutions that have a high focus on the types of servers in your infrastructure
- Demo possible monitoring solutions with real business systems in a secure non-production environment
- Engage a local technology partner for guidance on how to configure, implement, and tune the monitoring solution
Learn more about what you should expect when you engage a local technology partner to conduct an IT Infrastructure Assessment by downloading our Sample Assessment Report.
About the Author
Eric Jones
Eric Jones is an IT Consultant with nearly two decades of large scale IT experience. Throughout his career, he has focused on multi-discipline architecture and solutions design and has accumulated deep technical knowledge across the Microsoft, IBM and Symantec enterprise applications. Rooted in process, Eric is an experienced practitioner of both ITIL as well as Six Sigma principles and methodologies. He greatly enjoys devising solutions that result in a clear benefit for the Client. Read More…