I was reading an article by Penny Crosman in the “Wall Street & Technology Reports” January 2009 edition about monitoring servers in a remote data center and it provoked a few thoughts on the importance of monitoring of servers remotely.
The article discusses the need for in-depth monitoring tools, monitoring dashboards, and skilled engineers capable of managing thousands of servers with millions of data points. Without the proper tools in place for monitoring servers, you may be lulled into a false sense of security about the health of your servers and the applications your customers depend on. You need proactive monitoring tools in place, in order to know the server is crashing – before it’s too late.
Think about it – how do customers feel in 2010 when they can’t access data?
Don’t you hate when you need to access a website and you receive a “Server Too Busy” or other server/application error messages? It often happens when you need access to a website and you have limited time to grab the information and get your job done.
It’s so frustrating! It’s bad enough when you squeeze in time to pay bills on the weekend online at home and can’t access a banks’ website. Just think about what paying customers feel like when they can’t access critical data that is absolutely necessary to complete their job.
The cause of the error is usually one of the following:
1) too many users trying to access underpowered server hardware
2) server application error
3) client browser, software, or end-user hardware error
4) insufficient Internet capacity or bandwidth at the hosting location
5) server or network security breach
Making sure all of these issues are resolved can be very difficult. There’s tons of pressure on IT managers to keep costs low and provide excellent server uptime, especially in the post-2009 economy. A good IT architecture (think VMware, great hosting infrastructure, capable staff, solid applications) is a fantastic place to start.
Into 2010 now, keeping the servers running (regardless of where you host your servers – in-house, colocation, or in a managed dedicated server environment) requires the right tool set to manage the infrastructure. Do you grab some open source server and network monitoring code, learn how to use it, deploy it, configure the probes and monitoring thresholds, and hope it works? Or do you beg for capital to purchase enterprise monitoring tools and support, and the corresponding training sessions?
This can be a hard question to answer. Either way, you’re making a sacrifice.
We try to make it easy for our clients to get enterprise level monitoring tools and support without sacrificing too much. Our monitoring service, called OTMonitor is included with all of our managed dedicated servers, and for a low monthly fee, our colocation clients can add our proactive monitoring service as well.
Monitoring your server is not the cure-all for “Server Too Busy” problems, but it can go a long way in helping to limit those problems and help you avoid downtime.
