Years ago only the network administrator on staff for a duty shift would be pumping cups of coffee into himself while watching the data hum of the network on his monitoring screen. As long as things kept running, no massive movements of data were occurring in the middle of the night, and the electricity didn’t go out, things were good.
Today, server and network problems have to be identified immediately and as soon as they occur — and luckily there are tools to help. With thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars hinging on access every hour, real money can be lost with a downed network. As a result, an administrator needs top notch server monitoring tools that also track multiple features of a network — from response time to memory usage, to uptime to storage all-in-one. Fortunately, there are some really good server monitoring tools available now to manage the above. Here are three worth considering:
1. Happy Apps
Whether you want to monitor apps, databases, servers, or your entire IT system, Happy Apps allows you to do just that, across private, public and hybrid clouds. With it, you can monitor things like performance issues, outages, stored data, and more. Happy Apps allows you to view both individual and overall statuses, so you know exactly what needs attention — you can even set up your own custom queries if there is a particular area you want to monitor more closely. Best of all, this server monitoring tool allows you to set up rules for alerts so that you can be notified via email or SMS text when there is an issue or outage. Additionally, you can achieve aggregate performance tracking using this tool, as reports are saved. Their easy to read dashboard makes it easy to find the information you need to track issues, incidents, and reports.
2. Performance Co-Pilot
Used by Netflix, Performance Co-Pilot is a system performance and analysis framework which can collect metrics from a variety of operating systems, from databases to web servers and Mail systems, in real-time or via historical data. It works with all the major OS platforms, from Linux to Mac to Windows once a Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA), necessary for collecting domain performance metrics, has been installed. With its distributed system, Performance Co-Pilot enables a single desktop to monitor remote server systems with different operating systems and varying architectures. That’s a bonus for network administrators on the go and away from their desks, and businesses with diverse, spread-out IT infrastructures.
3. Nagios
If you’re looking for a tool that is highly customizable and allows you to build your own dashboard and alerts, Nagios Core is the tool for you. Nagios was built and designed on open source code and provides an administrator a desktop management view of the entire network and IT infrastructure. Nagios Core handles check scheduling, check processing, check execution, event handling, and alerting. However, you’ll need to integrate other Nagios projects in order to gain additional features like performance graphing, auto-discovery, distributed monitoring, and processing performance data. With over 800 independently developed add-ons, over 4,000 plugins and plenty of documentation all located within the Nagios Exchange, you can build the exact server monitoring tool you need.
While server monitoring is important to stay on-top of performance issues and threats, it is also critical that you monitor your backup data. If something slips through the cracks, despite your best server and data monitoring practices, you’ll need to rely on data backup to restore the data that’s been lost or compromised.
Use a cloud backup service to continually and automatically backup all of your critical data as it is created and changed. Ensure that you use a cloud backup provider that offers unlimited previous file version histories so that if you need to revert to a specific previous file version, whether due to an accidental change or a ransomware virus, you will be able to. A provider like Nordic Backup, which offers military grade security, unlimited previous file versions histories, continuous, automatic backups and more can help you better monitor your backup data. With backup reports that will notify you of successful backups, as well as unusually high numbers of recent file changes, you can stay alert to backup failures, the presence of ransomware viruses, and more.
Nordic Backup offers businesses a 3 month free trial so you can test it out before you buy.
