Advanced Server Monitoring With a Quality Monitoring Service

Online business owners often get confused between website monitoring and server monitoring and think both are one and the same. In some cases, they wrongly depend on the web hosting providers for these services without realizing the adverse impact it can make on their online business. When server monitoring is offered along with site monitoring, besides tracking uptime and downtime data, the service monitors overall health of the servers. It checks for issues caused by overloaded or crashed servers and also tracks bandwidth, firewall, routers and other network aspects to keep website and email running smoothly.

Why is Server Monitoring Important?

A normal website monitoring service may perhaps not include scanning of servers and networks for bottlenecks and irregularities. The performance of any website largely depends on functionality of underlying server. It is essential to keep the servers functionally stable and efficient to have proper working of websites. By having server monitoring strategy in place, it becomes easy to catch server issues before they become major concerns for site functioning. The data provided by server monitoring allows site owners to compare the performance of different servers and identify the location and cause of the issue. With server testing included in the monitoring service, websites will have reduced risk of problems and minimized downtime occurrences. 

Advanced server monitoring involves monitoring of components related to servers & network functionality. Troubleshooting server issues without proper data can prolong downtime duration. Many different problems can arise to servers and the network associated with it. Tracking down the root cause and isolating the problem is not an easy task for site owners. A quality service will monitor both software and hardware components and tracks all the processes.   Any change in the server or network status will be reported timely, which will facilitate site owners to work immediately on preventing the issue.

What is Included in Server Monitoring?

Server monitoring is not about monitoring just HTTP/HTTPS response. It includes checking of server resources such as CPU / RAM memory usage, storage, network performance and other processes. There could be plethora of issues like increased load on servers, reaching maximum bandwidth capacity, high server memory consumption and other things that could affect server performance. The process also checks the response of the server under peak loads and evaluates the increase in the capacity required to make it more sustainable. If a quality website monitoring service is chosen, it checks the availability and performance of FTP, DNS and database and also monitors SMTP, IMAP and POP3 email servers. This pretty much will include testing of all the metrics that are critical for website and email functionality.

What to Consider While Choosing Server Monitoring Service?

When you have a website, it is essential that every server that you have needs to be monitored and every service that you use including network and domain needs tracking. Manually monitoring servers without an automated system can make you lose your valuable time. When monitoring is outsourced to third party, they will take the responsibility of watching servers at regular intervals. This will make sure that none of the servers are down and as a result the risk of downtime is very less. However, while choosing a monitoring service you should check how effectively the servers are watched. In addition to monitoring of parameters like disk usage and server loads, the service should also verify working of critical services like DNS, SSH, mail, MySQL etc.