Monitoring the health and uptime of your web server or web host is important. You want to make sure your website is always available to your users, and that your website isn’t slow. Server monitoring tools allow you to gather and analyze data about your web server.
There are many great server monitoring solutions out there. I thought of sparing you the trouble by curating the list of the best server monitoring tools I could find.
Editor’s note: The last time we covered server monitoring tools was in 2009. We thought it was time to revisit this topic and also discuss some newer tools.
Performance Co-Pilot, PCP for short, is a system performance and analysis framework. It collates metrics from multiple hosts and analyzes metrics in real-time. It observes trends to help you identify abnormal performance patterns. It also has APIs that will help you craft your own monitoring and reporting solutions.
Anturis is a cloud-based SaaS platform for monitoring your servers, websites and IT infrastructure. With a comprehensive list of monitoring solutions, this is one service worth taking a look at.
SeaLion is a cloud-based Linux server monitoring tool. It’s a simple way of monitoring all your servers and diagnosing problems from a single dashboard. It takes just minutes to set up, it has instant alerts so that you’re quickly notified when there’s trouble brewing, daily data summaries, and more.
Icinga is a free and open source monitoring system which checks the availability of your server resources. It will log server problems and notify you of outages.
Munin is a network and system monitoring tool to help you analyze server resource trends. It’s designed to be a very plug-and-play solution. A default installation provides a lot of reports with almost no work from your end.
Monit is an open source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit can conduct automatic maintenance and repairs. It can perform various TCP/IP network checks and protocol checks.
Nagios is a powerful open source server/network monitoring solution that offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. It has a plugin API, so you can extend its out-of-the-box functionality.
brainypdm is a web-based data management and monitoring tool that gathers performance data from Nagios (above).
SysUsage monitors your system activity using Sar (Sysstat) and other system commands. It has a threshold notification system that will alert you when your server’s capabilities are close to being maxed out.
Zabbix is an open source performance monitoring solution. It can monitor performance and availability of servers, Web applications, databases, networking equipment, and more.
There is a good chance that I’ve missed some real gems out there. Please feel free to suggest other server monitoring tools in the comments.