Description

What is Server Monitoring?

implementing new servers meant that IT organizations had to invest heavily in data centers, hardware and the development of additional technical support and management capabilities. In today’s increasingly cloud-focused enterprise computing ecosystem, IT organizations can access additional servers to satisfy a variety of functions with minimal overhead. Cloud service providers like Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services on a pay-per-use basis, helping businesses to scale their networking, storage, servers and virtualization capabilities in the most cost-effective manner.

As organizations deploy more servers into the cloud, security can become a growing concern. Each additional network endpoint or cloud-deployed application represents a potential attack vector that a malicious actor could exploit to gain access to the network. Maintaining the performance and availability of servers, along with their security posture, can also play an important role in optimizing customer experience and minimizing unplanned downtime.

Because of these concerns, organizations that depend on servers that are deployed in the cloud must implement server monitor solutions that help maintain the security of cloud servers while tracking their performance and availability. Server monitoring can have different objectives and track different key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the type of server, but the primary objective of server monitoring is always to protect the server from possible failure that would interrupt service availability.

How Does Server Monitoring Work?
The exact workflow for server monitoring will change based on your chosen server monitoring software solution and the cloud-based server that you are trying to monitor. As your IT organization grows in size and number of deployments, you will need to select and configure a server monitoring tool that regularly collects data from every one of your cloud-based servers. The general process of server monitoring can be described in five steps:

• Identify the Most Important KPIs
  Server monitoring begins with the identification of exactly what data you would like to track on each server. Your choices here depend on the functionality that the server is delivering for your organization. For an application server, you might decide that the critical KPIs are availability and responsiveness. For a web server, capacity and speed might be the most important. For a data storage server, you might be more concerned about latency, data throughput, and data loss.
• Configure Data Collection and Analysis
  A server monitoring tool must be appropriately configured to pull data from the servers deployed in your cloud environment. Server monitoring tools track the activity on the server by streaming event logs, also called log files, that the server automatically generates. Log files contain information about errors, user activity and security events that happen on the server. In addition to log files, server monitoring tools track server operating system KPIs including CPU and memory availability, network connectivity and disk performance.
• Set Baseline KPI Values
  Once you have determined which KPIs are the most important, the next step is to measure the performance of each server on each KPI metric and determine an acceptable range of values for the KPI. This initial measurement will act as a baseline against which the future performance of the server will be measured.
• Set up Comprehensive and Specific Alerts
  your data collection and aggregation, the next step is to build out an alert system that will send notifications to you and your team when there is a KPI breach and your chosen metrics drop below threshold levels.
• Get Ready to Respond
  Finally, you’ll need to outline policy and procedure for responding to alerts. Who is responsible for investigating security alerts? Finding solutions to operational issues? What kinds of alerts should warrant a response, and how urgent should the response be? These are all questions that need to be answered as you define how your organization will treat each type of event notification.