What is server monitoring?
How does this positively affect your server's performance?
Getting started with server monitoring
- Automate as much as possible- Your team probably already has a solid understanding of fixes to common issues, automate those solutions as much as possible. For example, if a monitored service locks up semi-regularly and the solution is to simply restart it, configure an action to do so.
- Notify the right people- Automation is great, but your IT team is there for a reason, be sure they are notified when thresholds are exceeded and servers go down. Leverage email and SMS notifications where possible.
- Avoid desensitizing your team to alarms- One of the most overlooked issues in IT is alarm overload. Avoid sending your team alerts for trivial events that don’t require action. This means setting thresholds based on performance baselines, not arbitrary metrics that don’t fit your use case. For example, if server CPU spikes to 82% once a day when a particular batch process occurs and your team gets alarms at 80%, they’ll quickly learn to ignore these alarms.
- Track data to set performance baselines- In order to make better long-term decisions, you need to know what your IT investment is doing today. Leverage the data you gather to map up server resource utilization, areas where upgrades are required, and areas that may be creating bottlenecks in your infrastructure.