Server monitoring is a process whereby all the system resources associated with the server are monitored to understand their resource usage patterns and optimize them accordingly. Server health is an important aspect to keep your web server optimized and give best performance. A server monitoring software ensures that the server is capable of hosting the applications and there are many server monitoring tools available for this job.
Here we will reveal the top 10 server monitoring tools which will help your system run smoother and will ensure optimum resource utilization.
What is a Server Monitoring Tool?
A server monitoring tool analyses the processes and performance of your web server and give you a graphical presentation and data analytics. This graphical presentation and data represents how your server is performing. What are the processes that are using the maximum resources and when you need to scale up the resources on your virtual machines.
It analyses important metrics:
- CPU Usage / CPU utilization
- RAM(Memory) Consumption
- I/O
- Network Usage
- Top Processes
- Disk Usage
- etc
Types of Server Monitoring Tools
Based on your needs and role, you need to monitor a specific part of your server. There are different types of tools available for monitoring server health.
- Uptime monitoring tools
- Error monitoring tools
- Performance monitoring tools
- Resources monitoring
- Database monitoring tools
- Security analysis tools
- Infrastructure monitoring tool
Best Server Monitoring Tools
There are many tools available in the market, but it will not be justified to mention every tool on the list. We have checked the efficiency and based on the user reviews, compiled this list. So let us check our list of top 10 server monitoring tools, starting from the most preferred ones.
Grafana
Grafana is multi-platform, open-source analytics and interactive visualization software available since 2014. It offers a wide range of charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to support data sources. Not only this, but Grafana is also easily expandable through a plugin system.
Tech developers can create endless numbers of complex monitoring dashboards using interactive query builders. It is one of the best server monitoring tools often used with time series databases such as Prometheus, Graphite, and monitoring platforms such as Sensu, Netdata, and PRTG. The best part is that you can install the package on your cloud server and use it to monitor the server performance.
You can deploy Grafana with one click on SkySilk Cloud. Create a server with preinstalled Grafana now.
nagios xi
Nagios xi is another powerful monitoring tool that has been under active development for many years. Nagios xi has been written in C language, which extends your area of operation and allows you to do almost anything that a system and network administrator might need from the application package for monitoring purposes.
Though the configuration of Nagios is highly complex and can be a thing of problem for beginners, yet it’s a significant advantage at the same time because this feature enables it to accomplish any task of monitoring. The web interface is fast, intuitive, and the server part is highly reliable. Nagios allows one to continuously monitor the status of servers, services, network channels, and everything else that the IP network layer protocol understands.
New Relic
New Relic is a free web based server monitoring system that can be installed on your physical and virtual servers. With outstanding monitoring capabilities, New Relic analyzes the disk space, server health, the errors in your server stack and a lot more. The features include serverless monitoring, APM, infrastructure monitoring etc.
The free version will collect data about your server’s performance, stacks uptime, disk space and usage etc. No matter you have a linux cloud server or a windows server deployed for your applications, New Relic works seamlessly.
Cacti
Cacti is a cloud server monitoring tool, free to download and included in the LAMP suite, which provides a standardized software platform for building graphs based on any statistical data.
Cacti has proven to be such a monitoring toolkit that possesses extensive capabilities for graphical display and analysis of network performance trends that can be used to monitor almost any monitored metric represented in the graphical format.
Icinga
Icinga is another favored open-source network monitoring tool. Previously this used to be part of Nagios, but recently it was rewritten into a stand-alone solution known as Icinga 2. Icinga is a software monitoring and alerting platform that is as open and extensible as Nagios.
The difference lies in the configuration process of these two. Icinga can be configured via a web interface. It integrates many software packages for monitoring such as PNP4 Nagios, inGraph, and Graphite, which ultimately provides you with positive visualization of your network.
Zabbix
Zabbix is an all in one package of network and system monitoring tool, combined in one single web console. It can be configured to collect and monitor data from a wide variety of servers and network devices.
Zabbix enables you to monitor servers and networks with a wide range of tools that includes monitoring virtualization, hypervisors, and web stacks. Zabbix allows you to customize the dashboard and web interface to focus on a network’s most important components.
Observium
It is another major monitoring network equipment and server that has a huge list of supported devices using the SNMP protocol. Easy installation and configuration are its USPs. It is installed as its own server with a dedicated URL. Observium can explore surrounding networks and collect data for each detected system. Observium can also detect network devices via CDP, LLDP, or FDP.
A highly friendly user interface with advanced capabilities for the statistical display of data through graphs and diagrams are the unique features that make it demanding in the market.
PRTG
The Paessler PRTG network monitoring tool is an integrated solution for both small and enterprise environments. PRTG is more than just a server monitor because it can monitor IT-related resources that connect to your network. The application can track everything that you want to know about your server.
Also check – Best FTP Client tools for MacOS professionals
Server Density
This tool monitors onsite and cloud-based servers. It covers Linux and Windows onsite servers as well as AWS or Azure-based cloud servers. Server density is a highly friendly user interface that helps you get all the information regarding your resources. Not so complex configuration makes it easier for beginners, and that is one reason it is a fantastic monitoring tool.
Instrumental
Instrumental is an application monitor that covers server statuses, specifically CPU usage, disk status, load information, memory activity, network interaction, and page swapping events. Instrumental enables the process of monitoring servers very smoothly and efficiently.
Anturis
As a cloud-based server monitor, it tracks CPU, memory, disk usage, page swaps, power supply status, fan status, and temperature. Anturis offers a wide range of features that enables the process of monitoring servers exciting and secure.
Conclusion – Best Server Monitoring Software
With the above-mentioned tools, we finally conclude our list for utilizing the resources to an optimum level.
Server tools have become famous as logging in to each server individually and manually checking performance is a time-consuming activity. These are the top 10 server monitoring tools that provide a wide range of features for the smooth running of your system.
