Introduction
We are surrounded by technology everywhere. Your ATM is able to withdraw money with the help of a server, you face book page is stored and managed by a server; your cell phone has to connect to a server for you to be able to make and receive calls. Generally, servers play a crucial role in ensuring that our lives run smoothly. Hence, any server downtime is a major problem for the providers of many products and services. With this in mind, the technology world has been forced to come up with an ingenious idea of using a monitor server to keep other servers and systems that support them in check. In short, the work of a monitor server is to make sure the servers running as it should.
History
A monitor server is not necessarily hardware, but a piece of software designed to evaluate the performance of a server depending on statistics it collects from a number of sensors and other hardware. It is able to alert an administrator if any performance anomalies are discovered. Alerts are mostly sent via e mail, SMS, pager and even voice in case there are people standing by. These servers also create logs which are records of the many statistics they collect and can be useful to technicians when solving a problem.
Features
With this type of software running on your server, you do not require having a person monitoring it at all times. This has made it very convenient for companies and saves a lot of money and manpower. You also have on time and money as the monitor server will give you a diagnostic report of the most likely cause of the degradation of performance. A critical server going down in the middle of the night is a nightmare for any administrator. More sophisticated monitor server softwares have the ability to take corrective measure for any breakdown experienced. Additional feature include mobile applications for checking on performance from remote locations.
Majority of the monitor server software available are quite expensive but for those not willing to pay, there is a number of open source server monitor software like Monit and Ganglia
Monitor servers use monitor a number of aspects about a server’s performance. The most common values which are used to determine how effectively the server is running are temperature, network bandwidth statistics, power consumption, CPU loads, memory allocation, database performance and many others. Some of the most common monitor server software in the market includes Hyperic IQ, Nagios, Zabbix and Solarwinds. Although operating systems may have preinstalled server monitor tools, these off the shelf solutions integrate many tools making them the best solution to your server monitoring problems.
Tips and comments
Monitor server software come in all shapes in sizes. Therefore it is very crucial to evaluate the various solutions before deciding on one. Monitor server software like Monit are very effective for single server. Ganglia will work well on a standalone server but are much more suited for cluster servers. Extendibility is another important feature for any software. Monitor server software like Munin allows users to extend functionality by simply installing plugins.