The Data Corp

Being able to see the health of business critical servers and applications can be very difficult, particularly in a place with many different physical and virtual servers and applications. This is why you will need to choose an application with server monitoring that can keep track of all of these things.

It is important that the chosen application be simple to use. This means it should be easy and quick for the system administrator to set up on each server or application. By doing this, all the work may be multiplied by hundreds of servers and applications when needed to increase visibility to the IT environment in a timely manner.

A server monitoring application gets metrics from an operating system as well as certain applications to ensure it is all totally running fine. The monitoring application will have thresholds to watch out for that may indicate a problem. For instance, if a load average on a Linux or Unix system is too high, this could be the classic indication there’s a problem somewhere with the application of the server.

Typically, the data will be configured from the server to be sent to the monitoring application over the network, which usually resides in its own physical or virtual server instance. In many cases, the SNMP network protocol can be used for this. Then the application will send alerts when the thresholds have been exceeded, which would indicate some sort of a problem.

The application with the server monitor can run in several environments. Generally, preferred operating systems are available with most applications including Microsoft Windows Server, several variants of Linux, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, and VMware. The actual list depends upon the specific application.

It’s possible to have the application monitor some common applications out of the box like Apache Tomcat and Apache Web Server. For all custom and proprietary applications, it is possible to write short scripts that can monitor applications which are not already supported. Typically, programming the support for other applications is pretty simple to do for many system administrators.

There are a few ways to get the monitoring information. The first way is to log into the console. Depending on the Server Monitoring application, it may be web based or with a thick client. By doing this it is possible to create graphs and reports on what is happening within the IT environment. You can also track the exact time of outages as well as other times of performance degradation for further study.

The other method of getting information from the monitoring application is via alerts. Alerts can be sent via email to a regular email account. It may also be sent via text message to a cell phone so that an administrator can take the proper action, which may mean fixing the issue or clearing the alert status. This is a good way for businesses to reduce the amount of downtime that exists in the IT environment since problems can be detected relatively quickly using a monitoring application.