Monitoring Your Servers

Monitoring Your Servers

Before we explore approaches to monitor your servers we are going to state a hard truth. You should sign up for our 24/7 Management service instead.

If you care about your sleep, the uptime of your applications, going on holiday, minimising stress, server security, or having great support when you need it, our management is without doubt the single best investment you can make in your infrastructure.

We are being blunt here, we know, but we want you to have the best possible experience with us, and that includes management. Let our team with multiple decades of combined experience, paired with tooling that we have invested heavily into, do this for you.

The DIY Approach

If you've decided to do it yourself anyway, there's some tools we have that will be helpful, and some things you'll need to install and configure yourself.

Within the Monitoring section of the Control Panel you can configure monitoring alerts for the following:

• Basic HTTP/SSH/FTP/PING/IMAP/POP3 monitoring on a per hostname or IP basis.
• Bandwidth alerts to notify you if usage exceeds certain thresholds.

You can’t create alerts for CPU, Memory or Storage on our platform at this time, so you will need to use an external package or tool to do so. There’s plenty of options out there, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Some options that may be worth looking at are VictoriaMetrics, collectd, Nagios, DataDog, and Icinga. When choosing the right platform there's some key considerations to make:

• What is the pricing for a SaaS platform vs self hosting? How do the costs compare for the number of hosts and metrics you need to collect.
• Are there any unique/unusual metrics you want visibility over? Most will do the basics but some edge cases may not be available across the board.
• What does the installation process look like? Be wary of complicated systems that are going to require many hours of configuration and tweaking.

You should also consider the security of the respective platforms, as well as the resource usage requirements of running the metric collection software.

Monitoring Your Monitoring

When you have your metrics and monitoring system up and running the final consideration will be how do you monitor it, after all if monitoring alerts aren't going to get to you for some reason, you need to know about it.

Depending on the chosen solution you will likely require an external health check. Common methods can be hitting an API endpoint that returns the health of the system, or a system that detects when the last successful metrics collection was.