Many business owners often overlook the backbone of their network—the server infrastructure—when monitoring and assessing operational health. Many people fail to notice their servers’ performance until it becomes noticeably slow or unavailable. Often a change in the health of your server may result from a hardware failure, but sometimes it indicates a software vulnerability.
If you carefully monitor your systems, you can detect unusual behaviour, such as high resource utilisation, which may be a sign of malware. Identifying a potential issue beforehand can help you contain it. It takes an average of 258 days for security teams to identify and contain a data breach, according to “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024,” released by IBM and Ponemon Institute. On top of that, 91% of all security issues fail to trigger an alert.
Businesses rely on these machines to store and process data and to run associated applications. That’s why the health of your server should rank high on your list of priorities.
Some monitoring tools include an auto remediation feature which enables them to detect and resolve issues automatically with minimal human intervention. Such tools further reduce the mean time to resolve incidents as they occur.
This article will shed some light on the importance of server health monitoring, best practices, and what you can do to maintain a healthy server.
Server Health Monitoring Tools:
Attune – Attune offers advanced orchestration, scheduling, and workflow management. Power, reliability, and precision – all in one.
Before you learn about the importance of monitoring the health of your servers, what does server health monitoring entail?
Server health monitoring is the comprehensive process of assessing and generating a detailed overview of the performance and status of your servers. Some of the processes include monitoring hardware specifications, metrics, and server performance data.
In addition, a server health check helps to monitor CPU usage, memory usage, power consumption, and performance of different components to avoid downtime. Monitoring your servers can prevent system failures, increase performance, and ensure high availability.
IT infrastructure plays a crucial role in most businesses. If any of your infrastructure servers goes down, the consequences can be devastating. For instance, it can result in low productivity, and high downtime leading to loss of sales, security breaches, and negative brand perception. That is why it’s crucial to automate your IT infrastructure, build, compliance, security, configurations, testing, and deployment.
Automation tools are also crucial to ensure that your monitoring tools are correctly deployed, configured and onboarded.
Why Is It Important to Monitor Server Health?
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons that you should use server health monitoring tools to keep track of the health of your servers.
To keep you informed in the event of a server problem: A server monitoring tool’s primary function is to alert you if there is an issue with your server wherever you are. By doing so, you can act promptly to resolve the issue. There are two ways to monitor: either proactively or reactively, by looking at past events. The proactive server health monitoring process identifies indicators such as high CPU or memory usage, or high disk usage.
Clear overview of the entire infrastructure system: When there are multiple servers and networks, or when they reside in different places, this becomes increasingly important. With server health monitoring, you can monitor your whole system from a unified dashboard, giving you peace of mind that everything is operating efficiently.
Leveraging historical server data for better-informed decisions: You can review performance statistics for your server in the days, weeks, and even hours leading up to its failure. As a result, you can determine if the problem developed slowly over time, or if it occurred suddenly. Making the right decision in the future means understanding why issues develop in the first place.
Enhancing and Optimising server performance: With continuous alerts, dashboards, reports, and historical data, you’ll have greater insight into your server uptime and performance. Taking this into account will allow you to make the correct decisions long-term for optimising your network.
Identify potential Security Vulnerabilities: Some monitoring tools can scan your ecosystem identify potential security vulnerabilities and threats and provide recommendations for you to proactively patch and harden your systems.
How to Conduct a Server Health Check
The process of conducting a server health check varies depending on the server. In other words, there are different health checks for different servers. For instance, the performance metrics for web servers are different from those for file servers.
A network and server health monitoring tool should include the following:
Hardware metrics: For physical servers, it’s necessary to check the fans, disk drives, storage, CPU, memory, and their environmental conditions
Performance metrics: It should collect and collate server data on usage, uptime, and other KPIs.
Reports and dashboard: This should include all information on the status of the server, such as usage reports
Metric threshold: To set limits for catching issues before an outage
Notifications: Alerts for outages and metric thresholds to ensure rapid resolution.
Attune is a smart automation tool that runs scripts on multiple systems, whether they’re local or remote. It makes managing IT systems easier by automating everyday tasks, so you can focus on more important things.
Key Features:
Agentless operation: No need to install extra software—Attune works without additional agents, making it quick and efficient.
Advanced orchestration and scheduling: It automates complicated tasks and lets you control when and in what order they happen.
Real-time script iteration: You can test and fix scripts while they run, which helps prevent mistakes.
Error handling: Attune automatically fixes common issues, keeping your system running smoothly.
Use Cases:
Automating tasks like setting up servers, running health checks, and performing routine maintenance across different systems.
Managing updates, patches, and server configurations without having to do everything manually.
Benefits:
Keeps servers healthy by automating important monitoring and fixes.
Reduces downtime and boosts productivity, saving you time and effort.
Puppet is a powerful tool that helps manage and monitor servers automatically, making sure they stay consistent and perform well. It runs automated checks to keep your servers in top shape.
Key Features:
Centralised management: Control all your servers from one place, ensuring everything is set up the same way across your entire system.
Continuous monitoring: Keeps an eye on server performance and automatically fixes problems like high memory usage or slow speeds.
Scalability: Grows with your infrastructure, easily handling more servers as your needs expand.
Use Cases:
Managing large server networks, including both virtual and physical servers.
Automating regular tasks like health checks, installing software, and keeping systems up to date.
Benefits:
Reduces the amount of manual work and the chance for mistakes by automating server management.
Boosts server performance and reliability by ensuring everything stays consistent and well-maintained.
Nagios is an open-source tool that helps monitor your servers, networks, and applications. It provides real-time alerts to ensure everything is running smoothly and available when you need it.
Key Features:
Customisable alerts: Notifies you about issues like high CPU usage, low disc space, or network failures.
Real-time monitoring: tracks server and system performance live.
Centralised dashboard: Easy-to-use interface to manage multiple servers and devices.
Use Cases:
Monitoring on-premises and cloud servers.
Keeping an eye on network devices, services, and applications.
Benefits:
Alerts you to potential failures, reducing downtime.
Integrates well with other programs to create a comprehensive monitoring configuration.
Datadog is a cloud-based platform for monitoring and analysing server health and performance, offering a comprehensive view of infrastructure and application metrics.
Key Features:
AI-powered alerts: Uses machine learning to detect anomalies and predict issues before they occur.
Real-time observability: Provides a unified dashboard to monitor servers, applications, and services.
Integrated monitoring: Combines metrics from various sources, including cloud services and on-prem servers.
Use Cases:
Real-time monitoring for cloud-native server environments.
Performance analysis and anomaly detection in complex, distributed systems.
Benefits:
Offers actionable insights and predictive monitoring to prevent issues before they impact server health.
Suitable for hybrid and cloud infrastructures, providing centralised visibility across all systems.
Splunk is a powerful Log management, monitoring and data analysis platform designed to collect, index and analyze machine-generated data in real-time. It enables organizations to gain insights from logs, metrics and other structured and unstructured data sources. Splunk supports both on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments.
Key Features:
Data Collection & Indexing: Collects and indexes log data from various sources, including servers, applications, network devices and IoT devices.
Search & Querying: Uses Search Processing Language to extract meaningful insights from raw log data.
Visualization & Dashboards: Provides charts, graphs and reports for data visualization.
Alerting and Monitoring: Enables real-time alerting based on predefined conditions. Can send alerts to various targets such as Email, SMS, and Ticketing systems such as ServiceNow and Security tools.
Security and Compliance: Supports SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) capabilities through its Security Component (Splunk Security)
Use Cases:
IT Operations and Infrastructure Monitoring
Security Operations, Management and SIEM
DevOps and application performance monitoring
Business Analytics
IoT and Industrial Data Analytics
Benefits:
Real-timeLog Monitoring: Detects issues instantly reducing downtime and improving performance.
Centralized Data Management: Aggregates logs from various sources for easier Analysis
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual effort by automating log analysis and troubleshooting
Scalability: Handles large volumes of data efficiently
Data-Driven Decision Making: Provides actionable insights through analytics and reporting.
Prometheus is a metrics-based monitoring system designed for high reliability and scalability. It collects time-series data from targets via HTTP endpoints, stores them efficiently, and allows for querying and alerting.
Data collected from remote systems is stored in the Time Series Database as monitoring metrics. This data can then be used by visualization tools and custom applications for Analytics.
Key Features:
Pull-Based Data Collection: Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets instead of relying on pushed data.
Time-Series Database (TSDB): Stores metrics efficiently with time-stamped labels.
Powerful Query Language (PromQL): Enables querying and filtering of metrics for advanced analysis.
Built-in Alerting (Alertmanager): Handles alerting based on predefined metric thresholds.
Service Discovery & Auto-Scaling Support: Integrates with Kubernetes, Consul, EC2, and other environments.
Multi-Dimensional Data Model: Uses labels for flexible metric aggregation.
Benefits:
Highly Scalable & Reliable: Designed for monitoring dynamic, cloud-native environments.
Efficient Data Storage: Uses a lightweight TSDB optimized for time-series data.
Powerful Querying: PromQL enables deep metric analysis.
Flexible Integration: Works with Kubernetes, Docker, Node Exporter, and other exporters.
Decentralized Monitoring: This does not require a central server, making it resilient to failures.
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that integrates with multiple data sources, including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and MySQL. It provides interactive dashboards and alerting for real-time data monitoring.
Key Features:
Multi-Source Data Integration: Works with Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, etc.
Alerting System: Set up alerts based on defined thresholds and receive notifications via Slack, email, or webhooks.
User Access Control: Role-based access for managing dashboard permissions.
Templating & Variables: Create dynamic dashboards with reusable queries.
Annotations & Logs Integration: Overlay logs with metric graphs for deeper analysis.
Benefits:
Beautiful Visualizations: Supports time-series graphs, heatmaps, tables, and more.
Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Compatibility: Can monitor on-prem, AWS, GCP, and Azure workloads.
Flexible & Extensible: Supports plugins and integrations with various tools.
Easy Setup & Customization: Simple to configure and share dashboards.
Use Cases:
1. Real-Time Infrastructure Monitor
Create dashboards for server, network, and cloud infrastructure metrics.
Combine multiple data sources for holistic monitoring.
2. Application & API Monitoring
Visualize application health and response times.
Monitor API performance and track user behaviour.
3. Security & Incident Analysis
Overlay logs and security alerts on metric dashboards.
Investigate anomalies in traffic and system performance.
4. Business Analytics & KPIs
Track business performance metrics alongside system health.
Monitor customer interactions and operational trends.
What Should Server Health Monitoring Tools Check for?
The following are a few of the tasks that a server monitoring tool should help with:
Uptime Checks
Servers are a critical component of your server-based applications and services, which understandably means they need high availability. You can carry out uptime checks through a load balancer or external server monitoring tool.
For instance, the test could check to see that the server ports are available and new connections are possible. Tests could also perform checks to prove the server is responding within specified baseline parameters by making HTTP requests.
With a server monitoring tool, you can gain a thorough overview of your server workload and network. You can determine the performance of your server infrastructure by analysing a variety of performance variables such as bandwidth, uptime, and response time.
Other necessary checks involve ensuring status reports and alerts are sent and testing the viability of the configuration by pinging the server. In this way, you can quickly determine whether your network is close to 100% uptime.
Hardware Checks
The best performance is only possible when all software and hardware infrastructure is configured properly. Monitoring storage, memory, and CPU load can help avoid system lag or applications locking up.
In the event of storage running out of space, applications will stall and depending on the logical volume configuration, the operating system may crash. High memory and CPU usage will cause the system to lag and some applications may fail to function properly. Server monitoring can raise an alert and historical monitoring can identify if you need to increase the required resources for your system.
Additionally, the physical components of the server such as disks, fans and power supplies can be monitored for failure or abnormalities.
Dependency Checks
With dependency checks, you can gain insight into how your server interacts with other components. For instance, your application may need to send data to an SQL server. In the event that the two servers can’t communicate, the application may fail to operate properly.
A dependency check can detect expired credentials or incorrectly configured servers that prevent an application from accessing a database server. Dependency checks can also help run server patch management to ensure all patches are up-to-date.
Discrepancies in the network can be challenging to detect and cause problems when servers are not communicating effectively. Unreliable software can impact server performance by leaking memory or corrupting data. As network infrastructure and application architecture complexity increase, the interdependencies between servers are increasingly crucial.
Future-proof Your Infrastructure by Automating Server Health Monitoring
At this juncture, you may ask, how often should you check the health status of your server? To put it simply, if you want or need high availability of your services you’ll need real-time monitoring.
Of course, this can be a drain on the company’s resources. However, this is where a server health monitoring tool comes in. Server health monitoring tools simplify the process of monitoring, identifying, and resolving problems with servers. These tools help to automate routine tasks like ping, polling utilisation, and aggregating logs.
Attune is a server automation solution that is configured for scheduled monitoring servers, services, and applications across an entire environment made up of virtual and physical servers. Attune can also be configured to provision, patch, and secure, and ensure compliance. On top of that, automated solutions delivered with Attune help deliver high server availability and reduce downtime through consistent builds and consistent configuration deployment.
Server Health Monitoring: Frequently Asked Questions
How to monitor Windows server health?
Monitoring Windows server health requires numerous critical procedures to ensure the system runs smoothly and efficiently. Initially, use monitoring software such as Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager or third-party tools like Nagios or Zabbix. These utilities monitor several parameters, including CPU consumption, memory utilisation, disc space, and network traffic.
Additionally, install performance counters to collect certain information about the health of your server, such as disc delay or processor queue length. Configure notifications to warn you of any anomalies or possible problems.
Seek out mistakes, warnings, or important occurrences in event logs that could point to more serious issues. A robust backup strategy is critical to preventing data loss and system breakdowns.
Also, do periodic health checks, including hardware diagnostics, software upgrades, and security patches. Establish baseline performance measures to compare with future measurements, allowing for proactive detection of performance deterioration or possible bottlenecks.
Finally, document and keep records of monitoring setups, techniques, and results to aid troubleshooting and decision-making. By adhering to these guidelines, you may properly monitor Windows server health and assure peak performance and dependability.
How to check server health in Linux?
Checking server health in Linux entails various procedures to verify that the system is running well. Here is a simple guide:
Command Line Tools: Use built-in command-line tools like ‘top’, ‘htop’, and ‘free’ to track CPU, memory, and swap utilisation in real time.
Disc consumption: Use ‘df’ to check if adequate storage is available and ‘du’ to determine disc space consumption by individual folders.
Process Monitoring: Use ‘ps’ to examine running processes and their resource utilisation, and ‘pidstat’ to get more precise process information.
System Load: Use the ‘uptime’ or ‘w’ command to view system load averages across various periods.
Network Analysis: Use ‘iftop’ or ‘netstat’ to discover network connections and traffic patterns.
Log Files: Use ‘tail’, ‘grep’, or ‘less’ to search for problems or warnings in the system log files in the /var/log/ directory.
Hardware Information: Use programmes like ‘lscpu’, ‘lshw’, or ‘fdisk’ to get hardware information like CPU, memory, and disc size.
Service Status: To make sure vital services are operating without problems, use ‘systemctl’ status service> to check their current state.
Security: Update the system regularly with security updates using package managers such as apt (for Debian-based systems) or yum (for Red Hat-based systems).
By performing these checks regularly, you can ensure the health and stability of your Linux server, minimising downtime and maximising performance.
How to check SQL server health?
Monitoring the health of an SQL Server entails several critical actions to ensure optimal operation. Here’s a quick guide.
Resource Monitoring:
Regularly check CPU, memory, and disc utilisation.
For real-time tracking, use tools such as PerfMon or SQL Server Management Studio.
Error Log Review:
Review error logs regularly to fix issues as they arise.
Address any issues or warnings to ensure system stability.
Database Integrity Checks:
Run routine integrity checks with commands like DBCC CHECKDB.
Maintain data dependability and integrity in databases.
Security Prioritisation:
Perform frequent security audits to discover weaknesses.
Keep the server updated with the most recent fixes and upgrades.
Optimisation and performance:
Analyse query performance to discover and improve sluggish queries.
Ensure that the system runs efficiently for optimal performance.
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