With digital transformation and businesses getting online, there has been an increase in the importance of servers. Besides, when businesses grow, their infrastructure also undergoes expansion. That’s when infrastructure maintenance becomes a necessity more than ever. With that being said, monitoring is an important factor in making sure your system is up and running. With advanced technology and innovations, now it is easy for businesses to set up and administer multiple servers at the same time. Most importantly, now there are organizations offering server management services in India to help you with infrastructure monitoring. In that way, you can sit back and focus on the core business without worrying about your servers.
Now, what is a server monitoring tool? A server monitoring tool is generally a tool designed to track or monitor the status of your server in order to improve the scalability, speed and security of the network. Also, with proper warnings and alerts, you could improve server performance by eliminating threats. In addition, there are a lot of benefits to server monitoring tools which you might not be aware of. Most importantly, choosing an open-source monitoring tool for your business is necessary but may not be easy. Hence, here are some commonly used open-source monitoring tools to help you get an idea.
1. Prometheus
Prometheus is a monitoring solution generally used for analyzing time-series data. It has an attractive dashboard of network metrics as well as network alerts. Besides, with the help of an alert manager, alerts can be categorized based on severity. Additionally, this open-source monitoring tool measures system health, performance and behaviour to display the data metrics with detailed visualizations which can later be used to watch real-time metrics or generate reports. Besides, the stored data in Prometheus involves application metrics and system metrics that can be analyzed using Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) while allowing the program to produce graphics, tables, and plots on the monitors.
2. Nagios
The open-source monitoring tool, Nagios serves the purpose of monitoring applications, websites, system metrics, network protocols, operating systems, web servers and more. Written in C programming language, Nagios is published under General Public License (GPL) and needs very less administration time. While monitoring the critical infrastructure components, Nagios allows the addition of new functionalities or integration of third-party applications making use of customizable plugins. Also, Nagios displays metrics and statuses on its dashboard that assist in the predictive analysis of data. Most importantly, Nagios can be used for monitoring both Windows and Linux servers.
3. Zabbix
Zabbix is generally a free and open-source tool used to monitor system functions including network and application status. It has a user-friendly interface and offers enterprise-class solutions to large companies. In this case, for further processing, the data remain stored in a relational database. In addition, memory utilization, disk space, CPU operations, power supply performance and more are the key elements monitored by Zabbix to determine the server performance. Besides, the graphical user interface of Zabbix contains a customizable dashboard involving graphs, widgets, slides, reports and network maps. Additionally, Zabbix allows both agentless and agent-based monitoring solutions for servers.
4. Cacti
Connected to the RRD Tool, Cacti is another open-source monitoring tool that can be deployed in Linux or Windows operating systems. It collects network data by utilizing data gathering functionality and network polling. These custom scripts of data stored in the MySQL database are then turned into graphs displayed along with bandwidth statistics by making use of SNMP (Simple Network Management Tool). Besides, the frontend of the Cacti server monitoring tool is written in PHP with an intuitive graphical interface. Additionally, most of the functionalities of the Cacti tool can be configured through the web and offers user-based management and high security.
5. Icinga
Built as a variation of Nagios core, they share some common features. However, its enhanced agile development cycle and easy configuration compared to Nagios have captured many minds. The performance and availability of the network are measured via a web interface while monitoring server components, network services, and host services. Most importantly, it offers cross-platform support for different operating systems and performs parallelized service checks to issue alerts whenever necessary. In addition, Icinga can make use of a classic user interface or Icinga web interface to monitor both on-site infrastructure and cloud infrastructure.
Conclusion
In short, there are several monitoring tools available today free and paid. But it is best that you choose from the best open-source server monitoring tool to track or monitor the status of your IT infrastructure, applications, websites, networks and more. Most importantly, there are organizations offering remote server management and monitoring services today in this digital era. You could take assistance from them for the effective monitoring of your servers in turn enhancing the server performance.
