Seeing the health of business critical servers and applications can be very difficult, particularly in a place with numerous physical and virtual servers and applications. That is why you will need to choose an application with server monitoring that will monitor all of these things.

It is crucial 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. This way, all of the work can be multiplied by numerous 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 and also certain applications to make sure it is all totally running fine. The monitoring application may have thresholds to watch out for that would indicate a problem. For instance, if the 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.

Generally, the information will be configured from the server to be sent to the monitoring application over the network, which often resides within its own physical or virtual server instance. Oftentimes, the SNMP network protocol can be used for this. Then the application will send alerts when the thresholds have exceeded, which may indicate some sort of an issue.

The application with the server monitor can run in several environments. Typically, preferred operating systems are available with most applications including Microsoft Windows Server, many variants of Linux, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, and VMware. The exact list depends on the particular application.

It is possible to have an 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 that are not already supported. Typically, programming the support for other applications is fairly simple to do for many system administrators.

There are two methods for getting the monitoring information. The first method is to log into the console. Depending on the Server Monitoring application, it might be web based or with a thick client. This way you’ll be able to create graphs and reports on what is going on in the IT environment. You can also track the precise time of outages as well as other times of performance degradation for further study.

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

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