Key points
- Server monitoring tracks system health metrics and automatically alerts IT staff when performance drops beyond defined limits.
- Combining performance metrics with system events and activity logs helps administrators quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues.
- Centralized dashboards let IT teams manage multiple systems while using historical data to spot trends and prevent future problems.
- Administrators must carefully tune alert thresholds based on normal system behavior to prevent false alarms and alert fatigue.
- Organizations should monitor performance from the end-user’s perspective and require monitoring to be enabled before any new system launches.
- Selecting the right management software requires finding a unified platform that efficiently handles automated updates, remote access, and network tracking.
Server and IT infrastructure monitoring are the practice of tracking a server’s performance, health, and status, such as CPU load, memory, and disk space, and automatically notifying IT staff when a defined threshold is crossed.
This guide explains what server monitoring and alerting are, the core metrics IT teams should track, and nine best practices for building a reliable alerting strategy. It covers events, logs, and the business benefits of centralized reporting, and closes with what to look for in server monitoring and alerting software. The guide is written for IT professionals and managed service providers responsible for keeping servers and IT infrastructure healthy.
What this article will cover:
- What is server monitoring and alerting?
- What should you be monitoring?
- Server monitoring best practices
- Software for remote server monitoring and alerting
Server monitoring allows IT professionals to track performance, health, and status data about a server — for example, CPU load, memory utilization, active processes, and disk space levels. Monitoring is typically tied to an alerting system that notifies key personnel when critical events occur or when specific thresholds are reached. This real-time reporting allows system administrators to remedy the situation and avoid further issues.
What is server monitoring and alerting?
Key to the concept of a remote monitoring system are the elements of metrics, monitoring, and alerting. Metrics are simply the data used to measure and monitor server performance, health, and availability.
Monitoring is the associated aspect that allows IT professionals to read and interpret this incoming data to gain insight into how applications and systems are performing. Monitoring involves collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the metrics in a meaningful way.
Alerting is built on top of these other two elements. Whenever specified metrics meet defined conditions, the monitoring element sends notifications to designated individuals so they can identify and remediate any problems.
What is the purpose of server monitoring?
Because a server monitoring system allows you to gather, store, and visualize metrics, events, logs, and traces in real-time, it enables you to glimpse the bigger picture of what’s happening across your infrastructure in real-time.
Most monitoring solutions allow users to aggregate or analyze both current and historical data that has been retained or archived. Analyzing data over longer periods allows you to identify trends and patterns that are invisible without the full picture of your server infrastructure. The best network monitoring solutions allow for customized data visualization and reporting, allowing you to build graphs and charts that make key metrics easier to understand. And since these systems can correlate data across different inputs, sysadmins can see how resources relate to one another across environments or groups of servers.
Additionally, one of the most important benefits of server monitoring is alerting.
It can be challenging, and sometimes nearly impossible, to measure performance at all levels of the deployment, including components, applications, and services. This is even more true for managed IT service providers who are responsible for monitoring and managing IT environments across numerous clients. In addition to the visibility gained by centralizing application and infrastructure monitoring, log management and analysis, tracing, real user, and synthetic monitoring, the best monitoring solutions will provide timely alerts that ensure even small IT teams stay on top of large technological ecosystems.
What server metrics should be tracked and reported?
We know that metrics are the raw data about resource usage, behavior, or performance that your monitoring system collects from within your infrastructure. These metrics can be fed into your monitoring solution via installed agents or through an agentless system. They can also be collected directly from the operating system or an application.
Operating system metrics usually include baseline information about resources such as CPU, RAM usage, and disk space. These are readily available bits of data that can be sent to your monitoring system.
Other components, hardware, and custom applications require integrations, agents, or other means of transferring the relevant data. This is where code or agents must be installed to interface with the monitoring tool.
Regardless of how data is collected, it’s important to know which data points beyond basic resource usage need to be tracked and reported. While every use case varies, there are some basics that should always be considered.
Events
Many monitoring systems can also capture events that are typically generated and collected at the time they occur. Event data fed into a monitoring tool will typically provide an overview of what happened, where it happened, and when it happened. When examined alongside other metrics, IT professionals can more readily troubleshoot the root cause of an issue.
Logs
It’s not generally possible to troubleshoot issues with metrics alone. Logs fill in the information gaps by providing information about what applications, services, and even users have been doing within the IT environment. In essence, logs are a “paper trail” of events that show activity which is extremely valuable for troubleshooting. As you can imagine, log data of all network traffic can rack up fairly quickly and is often impossible to monitor manually. For this reason, monitoring and reporting solutions typically allow alerts to be configured for specific log activity, similar to how events and metrics can trigger timely notifications.
Why is server monitoring and reporting important?
Even simple metrics help system admins remotely access and understand the current health of their infrastructure and applications. Alert rules and notifications make this even more beneficial.
Perhaps the most overwhelming benefit is the aggregation of large amounts of valuable data into a single dashboard, especially when the monitoring tool provides a centralized, multitenant means of tracking numerous disparate systems.
In addition to facilitating this kind of large-scale monitoring across different clients or environments, benefits include:
Notification of when there is or could be a server issue
By and large, the most critical function of server monitoring is real-time remote alerting of potential issues that threaten the stability of the IT environment. Such alerts allow IT professionals to quickly remedy potentially dangerous situations to keep the server running. This data allows for a far more proactive approach to IT management.
Providing a clear overview of all systems
With larger server and network setups, it’s difficult to keep an eye on every important aspect, especially when they are physically located in different places. Remote server monitoring lets IT professionals maintain a detailed overview of all systems via a unified dashboard. Without this functionality, the IT industry would struggle to provide customer support that meets modern standards.
Fuel smarter decision-making with historical data
Server monitoring solutions give insight into the hours, days, and weeks leading up to a critical issue. This lets you determine whether the issue built up slowly over time or failed spontaneously. Knowing why issues are occurring and what has occurred before will help you make better decisions about resource allocation, budgets, asset management, or hardware replacements.
Ensuring better server performance over time
Ongoing alerts, overview dashboards, and historical data allow IT pros to truly master their server management and give them deeper insight into what has worked and what hasn’t. These details allow for far more accurate optimization.
Server monitoring best practices
Setting up remote server monitoring effectively allows IT teams to take proactive steps to maintain and optimize server performance and health. Configuring timely notifications and continuous visibility into your server monitoring and alerting enables faster response times. The following are some key best practices to follow if you want to implement effective server monitoring and alerting:
| Best Practice | Core Action | Why It Matters |
| Comprehensive Scope | Monitor both underlying components and the system as a whole. | Shows how individual components behave and influence each other for a big-picture view. |
| Baseline-Driven Alerts | Use historical data to define alerts based on deviations from normal baselines. | Establishes scientifically how many standard deviations are safe before triggering an alert. |
| False Alarm Tuning | Hone alert and reporting rules to eliminate false positives. | Prevents “alert fatigue,” which causes engineers to ignore critical warnings. |
| Service-Level Focus | Track overall services rather than individual components in dynamic infrastructures. | Cuts through the noise of rapidly changing, ephemeral infrastructure environments. |
| Production Readiness | Establish strict rules that require monitoring and alert setups before deploying new services. | Ensures no new hardware or software goes to production without a safety net. |
| User-Centric Tracking | Capture metrics from real users and their actual geographic locations. | Measures performance from the viewpoint of real-world end users. |
| Third-Party Oversight | Include external and third-party services in your monitoring plan. | Prevents external outages from degrading user experience or appearing as internal failures. |
| Continuous Strategy Reviews | Evaluate and update your monitoring strategy regularly. | Keeps your alerting system aligned with changes and growth in your IT environment. |
| Environment Benchmarking | Compare your metrics against other IT environments using top monitoring tools. | Identifies weak spots and helps improve overall system response times. |
Choosing the best server monitoring and alerting software
Not all network monitoring systems are created equally. Your best option will depend largely on your use case and the needs of your IT environment. For the managed service provider (MSP) specifically, we recommend a solution that offers all of the features necessary to monitor and manage multiple clients. Review the video guide on Server Monitoring and Alerting.
Among the features you should look for are RMM software, patch management, SNMP, NetFlow, and Syslog notification monitoring.
IT monitoring and management is no longer a question of “if” but of “how”. Understanding server monitoring tools and methodologies makes it easier to manage and secure your servers. Configuring and automating server monitoring and alerting tools also allows your IT team to focus on detecting and resolving issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime and reducing repetitive manual tasks.
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