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.

What is Server Health Check?

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 go 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.

Tools to Automate Server Health Monitoring

AttuneOps

Overview:

AttuneOps 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 that you can focus on more important things.

Key Features:

• Agentless operation: No need to install extra software—AttuneOps 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: AttuneOps 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

Overview:

Puppet is a powerful tool for automatically managing and monitoring servers, ensuring consistency and performance. 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

Overview:

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.

Zabbix

Overview:

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool that offers real-time monitoring for large infrastructures, including servers, networks, and applications.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive monitoring: Tracks a wide range of metrics, from server health to network performance.
• Auto-discovery: Automatically detects servers and devices, streamlining setup.
• Customisable dashboards: Create tailored dashboards and reports to monitor performance.

Use Cases:

• Ideal for large infrastructures that require monitoring of multiple servers, applications, and services.
• Automates health checks and sends alerts for performance issues or potential failures.

Benefits:

• Offers detailed insights into server health with powerful alerts and reporting.
• Scalable and flexible, making it perfect for businesses of all sizes.

Datadog

Overview:

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 Enterprise

Splunk is a powerful Log management, monitoring and data analysis platform designed to collect, index and analyse machine-generated data in real-time. It enables organisations to gain insights from logs, metrics and other structured and unstructured data sources. Splunk supports both on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments.

Key Features:

1. Data Collection & Indexing: Collects and indexes log data from various sources, including servers, applications, network devices and IoT devices.
2. Search & Querying: Uses Search Processing Language to extract meaningful insights from raw log data.
3. Visualisation & Dashboards: Provides charts, graphs and reports for data visualisation.
4. 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.
5. Security and Compliance: Supports SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) capabilities through its Security Component (Splunk Security)

Use Cases:

1. IT Operations and Infrastructure Monitoring
2. Security Operations, Management and SIEM
3. DevOps and application performance monitoring
4. Business Analytics
5. IoT and Industrial Data Analytics

Benefits:

1. Real-timeLog Monitoring: Detects issues instantly, reducing downtime and improving performance.
2. Centralised Data Management: Aggregates logs from various sources for easier Analysis
3. Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual effort by automating log analysis and troubleshooting
4. Scalability: Handles large volumes of data efficiently
5. Data-Driven Decision Making: Provides actionable insights through analytics and reporting.

Prometheus

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 visualisation tools and custom applications for Analytics.

Key Features:

1. Pull-Based Data Collection: Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets instead of relying on pushed data.
2. Time-Series Database (TSDB): Stores metrics efficiently with time-stamped labels.
3. Powerful Query Language (PromQL): Enables querying and filtering of metrics for advanced analysis.
4. Built-in Alerting (Alertmanager): Handles alerting based on predefined metric thresholds.
5. Service Discovery & Auto-Scaling Support: Integrates with Kubernetes, Consul, EC2, and other environments.
6. Multi-Dimensional Data Model: Uses labels for flexible metric aggregation.

Benefits:

1. Highly Scalable & Reliable: Designed for monitoring dynamic, cloud-native environments.
2. Efficient Data Storage: Uses a lightweight TSDB optimised for time-series data.
3. Powerful Querying: PromQL enables deep metric analysis.
4. Flexible Integration: Works with Kubernetes, Docker, Node Exporter, and other exporters.
5. Decentralised Monitoring: This does not require a central server, making it resilient to failures.

Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualisation 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:

1. Multi-Source Data Integration: Works with Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, etc.
2. Interactive Dashboards: Create real-time, customizable visualisations.
3. Alerting System: Set up alerts based on defined thresholds and receive notifications via Slack, email, or webhooks.
4. User Access Control: Role-based access for managing dashboard permissions.
5. Templating & Variables: Create dynamic dashboards with reusable queries.
6. Annotations & Logs Integration: Overlay logs with metric graphs for deeper analysis.

Benefits:

1. Beautiful Visualisations: Supports time-series graphs, heatmaps, tables, and more.
2. Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Compatibility: Can monitor on-prem, AWS, GCP, and Azure workloads.
3. Flexible & Extensible: Supports plugins and integrations with various tools.
4. Easy Setup & Customisation: 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

• Visualise 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 an 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.

AttuneOps is a server automation solution that is configured for scheduled monitoring of servers, services, and applications across an entire environment made up of virtual and physical servers. AttuneOps can also be configured to provision, patch, and secure, and ensure compliance. On top of that, automated solutions delivered with AttuneOps help deliver high server availability and reduce downtime through consistent builds and consistent configuration deployment.

Server Health Monitoring: Frequently Asked Questions