Servers form a critical component of any network. They provide resources for the daily functioning of the applications and workloads hosted across the network. Any performance degradation in servers can have a cascading effect on the network. For example, if a critical server that hosts the production data for manufacturing crashes, the entire manufacturing workflow will get affected, delaying deadlines. This is why maintaining the health of servers is vital for seamless business operations. On this page we will discuss:
Server health monitoring is the process of monitoring the availability and performance of servers. In general, server health is assessed based on key metrics like CPU, disk, and memory utilization. Modern server monitoring presents unique challenges, driven by the architectural shift from physical to virtualized infrastructure. Unlike the straightforward management of traditional physical servers, modern strategies must account for a single hardware host provisioning multiple virtual servers, each dedicated to a distinct application or workload. Adding to this complexity is the variety of servers used in an organization, including.
Enterprise organizations often have distributed architectures with multiple data centers, branch offices, and corporate locations. This makes it difficult to monitor the servers across different locations. Also, workloads are hosted in the cloud based platforms in addition to the traditional on-premises setup. This hybrid setup means administrators end up using separate tools for each environment, leading to siloed data. This data compartmentalization can delay troubleshooting, affect root cause analysis (RCA) and eventually cause SLA breaches.
In a modern IT environment, servers are no longer just physical machines. Organizations use virtualization technique and deploy virtual machines (VMs) to run on a single physical server. Although, this ensures efficient resource utilization, it also introduces the complexity of VM sprawl where virtual machines are created faster at an indiscriminate pace. This brings performance bottlenecks and increases the administrative overhead. Further, the rise of containers has added another layer of complexity. Companies rely on containers as they are lightweight and easy to scale up. So, now for server teams, this means they have to manage both VMs and containers often across a multi-vendor and hybrid environments, effectively making server monitoring, a challenging task.
Server health is dependent on the state of the associated hardware. If the cooling systems malfunction, your servers can overheat and slow down, affecting the application waiting upon the server for resources. The electrical system that powers your data centers can sometimes be affected due to bad weather, voltage fluctuations, or grid failures, and even this can cause a server outage unless you have a backup power source. So, proactive monitoring is essential to detect hardware problems and prevent them in the first place.
Servers provide the critical backend resources like CPU, memory, and storage for your workloads such as applications, websites, and business services. Without insights into how your resources are being used, you might risk overloading particular servers while under-utilizing others. This can create an imbalance and reduce the overall lifespan of your servers, resulting in premature replacements.
Configuration changes over time can make your servers deviate from their original baseline configuration. Unapproved manual changes, patches can result configuration drift, which cascades into performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and compliance failures. In heavily regulated industries like the BFSI sector, such compliance failures can quickly escalate into SLA breaches, and result in heavy financial penalties. For IT teams, managing configurations and ensuring only authentic changes are made is a huge challenge.
Windows servers are used widely from individuals for their personal needs to large scale organizations to power their workloads and business services, databases, and Active Directories. So any outage to windows servers can have a significant impact worldwide because of its large customer base.
Linux servers are utilized for its open sourcen quality and their customization features. Generally, organizations go for Linux servers as the total cost of ownership is lesser comparing to Windows.
| Linux | Windows |
| Relying on traditional monitoring methods such as Shell commands can be time consuming, especially for large scale organizations. | Failing to maintain uptime can have a siginificant impact on business, as most of the services are dependent on servers. |
| Monitoring and maintaining compliance across multiple Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise, SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and CentOS becomes a challenge. | Managing multiple versions, such as Windows NT, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, across distributed network is a demanding job. |
Enterprise organizations do not rely on one type of server. Most environments run a mix of Windows and Linux servers, each critical to business continuity. Relying on seperate tools for Windows server monitoring and Linux server monitoring can create silos and blind spots which slows down troubleshooting, and increases operational overhead.
Consider you are a corporate financial services provider. Your servers hold customer data, aid in processing financial transactions, and also host customer-facing apps used for loan disbursement and policy serving. Imagine, one of your core servers goes down during the time of policy renewal. Because it is peak season, many customers are trying to make renewals, which effectively slows down the operations, as an indiscriminate amount of requests are loaded on your servers.
This can have a direct negative impact on your business. Now, with a server monitoring tool, you configure key metrics and understand how your server resources are used over time. It will raise alerts when the configured thresholds are violated, helping you to detect issues proactively. Not just that, modern solutions with AI and ML capabilities can learn from past data, identify seasonal traffic in advance and help you scale up or reallocate your resources for efficient performance. In effect, you can avoid these challenges with the help of a server health monitoring tool.
Robust server monitoring solutions provide full-stack visibility into your network, not only monitoring server health and performance but also helping you understand how your services and workloads might be affected by server issues.
ManageEngine OpManager comes bundled with server monitoring features and supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring mechanisms to monitor server devices. OpManager is a vendor agnostic tools and supports major vendors like Windows, Linux or virtual servers like VMware, Hyper-V. You can monitor server uptime, processes, services, as well as key metrics like the uptime, CPU, memory, processes, services, and disk space and understand how your critical resources are utilized over time with ML driven graphs and reports.
To learn more about these features and how it can help manage your network better, take a free personalized demo or try our product for yourself with our free edition.
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