Monitoring
One of the essential aspects of owning a server is the need to monitor and maintain its stability. Early detection of issues can help you react faster and prevent massive downtime, making your clients happier and increasing profitability.
To keep your server performing at its best, it is important to monitor several performance indicators. These can include hardware statistics such as CPU usage, average loads, RAM usage, disk space, and disk health. You can also track the availability of services and ports.
Here, we will provide a brief overview of several tools that we and our clients use for monitoring. These tools can help you effectively monitor your server's performance and ensure that it is running efficiently.
Uptimerobot
Uptimerobot is a free and user-friendly tool for monitoring web services. The free version is more than enough for basic needs, allowing you to monitor and receive alerts on several crucial metrics such as:
web page accessibility
ping test results
accessibility of a certain port (useful for monitoring device ports or services like SMTP, DNS, POP)
presence of a specific keyword on a web-page
The main benefit of Uptimerobot is its simplicity, as anyone can operate the service regardless of their IT skills. Additionally, you do not need your SMTP server to receive alerts. Another notable feature is the ability to create a publicly available dashboard that can be hosted on your domain. You can then link it to your site or share it with customers to keep them informed of the current status at any time.
The paid version of the service offers some interesting features, such as SSL certificate checks and certificate expiration notifications, as well as SMS notifications.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a powerful, free tool that can monitor various server resources and web-page accessibility. However, unlike other services mentioned, Zabbix needs to be installed on a separate server, making the setup process more advanced. However, this deployment method makes Zabbix ideal for monitoring servers with restricted or no access to the internet.
The configuration process for Zabbix involves two steps: first, installing and configuring the Zabbix server instance, and second, installing and configuring Zabbix monitor services on the servers you want to track. Once these steps are completed, you can monitor everything from basic statistics such as RAM usage, CPU loads, and disk space to more specific options like MySQL status, variable values, and performance.
We highly recommend using multiple tools simultaneously, such as UptimeRobot and Zabbix, as this gives you the most control. One tool can serve external customers, while the other can be a powerful engine for internal work.
While these are our favorites, there are plenty of other services available online to choose from. If you need assistance setting up any of the services listed above, we would be glad to help you. Please contact your Navixy account manager for more details and requirements.