Server and Application Monitoring 101

Featured Article by Robert Cordray, Independant Technology Author

In order to succeed in today’s competitive business world, many organizations have placed system administrators and IT departments under pressure to do more with less. Unfortunately, the challenge of keeping complex networks running smoothly with reduced resources creates heavy workloads that can compromise productivity.

A better approach is server and application monitoring software, a cost-effective solution that frees up IT personnel and resources for more productive and profitable tasks. For organizations faced with the challenge of running large networks with overburdened IT departments and stretched resources, here’s a brief look at server and application monitoring software.

Server Monitoring software allows tech personnel to monitor server system resources such as CPU usage, memory consumption, I/O, network, disk usage, network collisions, adapter transmit rate and other processes on the network. Server monitoring gives systems administrators and IT a clear picture with regard to system resource usage. This capability enables better capacity planning and ensures a better end-user experience as the network is kept running smoothly. Through server monitoring, tech personnel can observe the health and integrity of the underlying server and make sure that it is capable of hosting applications. Used in conjunction with application monitoring data, server monitoring provides an accurate view of the workings of the operating system.

Application Monitoring, also referred to as application performance monitoring (APM) provides the means to ensure that a given software application processes and performs in the manner and capacity needed in order to provide a quality end-user experience. Specifically, application monitoring is designed to consistently identify, measure, and evaluate an application’s performance, along with providing the means to isolate and correct any defects or shortcomings associated with the application. Like server monitoring, application monitoring requires specialized software, incorporated within the specific application being monitored.

Application monitoring provides application administrators with key runtime metrics relating to system performance. Among these metrics are transaction time, system response, transaction volume and other metrics pertaining to the back-end infrastructure’s overall health and integrity. Ideally, these metrics are delivered in the form of graphical figures and statistics on an application monitoring software dashboard. Using these metrics, administrators are able to   evaluate the performance of a given application and if desired the performance of the entire application infrastructure.

When considering server monitoring and application monitoring software, look for the following key features:

Ease of Installation and use

While a number of commercially available server monitoring software and application monitoring software packages are suited to the task, many are difficult and time-consuming to install and not all that easy to use. Look for solutions that are easy to deploy, use and manage without requiring expensive consultants to get things up and running.

Comprehensive monitoring

Monitoring software should be comprehensive, providing visibility into critical applications by monitoring, alerting, and reporting on the health, performance and availability of all applications running in the environment.

Hardware monitoring

While monitoring application and virtual infrastructure health and performance is of primary importance, monitoring software should also provide server monitoring across multiple hardware vendors and provide alerts of component failures and performance degradation.

All-in-one monitoring

To make server monitoring and application monitoring easier and more affordable some companies. The advantage of an integrated solution is that it enables monitoring for all critical server and application elements within the same user interface. And with over 150 built-in server and application performance monitors, SolarWinds’software provides comprehensive visibility into server, virtual machine, and application problems to speed up troubleshooting of performance issues and preserve the quality of the end-user experience.

Software to monitor the health and performance of servers and applications is a must-have for any enterprise IT department. In selecting server and application monitoring software organizations need to do their homework to make sure they choose the solution that best suits their needs and budgets.