20+ Top Server Management and Monitoring Tools

Enterprises run multiple servers to deliver business critical services for their end users. Some of them include database servers, core app servers, caching servers, web servers, and more. Performance of each of these servers are critical because even if one of the servers fail, then it impacts the delivery of business critical services.

Therefore it is imperative to know any performance issues proactively so that they are identified at the early stage and fixed before they turn big and pose a threat to business. Server monitoring tools help in monitoring servers as well as the entire infrastructure. They also provide intensive reports on capacity planning to maintain the network without any hassle.

Server Monitor

Server Monitoring is the process of monitoring a server’s system resources like CPU Usage, Memory Consumption, I/O, Network, Disk Usage, Process etc. Server Monitoring also helps in capacity planning by understanding the server’s system resource usage.

A server monitor software helps in automating the process of server monitoring. Server performance monitoring also helps in identifying other performance related issues like resource utilization, app downtime and response time.

Why is it important to monitor server performance?

• To monitor server availability and data loss.
• To monitor the responsiveness of the server.
• To know the server capacity, user load and speed of the server.
• To detect and prevent any issues that might affect the server proactively.

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collectd – The system statistics collection daemon

Collectd – gathers metrics from various sources, e.g. the operating system, applications, logfiles and external devices, and stores this information or makes it available over the network. Those statistics can be used to monitor systems, find performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you’re at the right place, too ;).

NixSTAT – THE COMPLETE TOOL FOR MONITORING

Nixstats – Keep track of your servers infrastructure usage and prevent downtime and performance issues. Over 40 plugins available out-of-the-box such as CPU, Process, Network, NGiNX, Disk I/O and much more.

Monitorix

Monitorix – Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services and system resources as possible. It has been created to be used under production Linux/UNIX servers, but due to its simplicity and small size can be used on embedded devices as well.

ScoutRealtime

Scoutapp Realtime –  Tool useful for the developer, let you monitor disk, memory, network, CPU, and process metrics.

Glances – An Eye on Your System

Glances – Written in Python, Glances will run on almost any plaftorm : GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows. Glances includes a XML-RPC server and a RESTful JSON API which can be used by another client software.

NetData – Get Control of your Linux Server

My-netdata.io – MONITOR EVERYTHING IN REAL-TIME. Instantly diagnose slowdowns and anomalies in your infrastructure with thousands of metrics, interactive visualizations, and insightful health alarms.

Cabot – monitor and alert

Cabotapp – Easy to use, self hosted, an opensource monitoring tool for system administrators. Get alerted when services go down or metrics go crazy

Graphite

Graphiteapp – Graphite is an enterprise-ready monitoring tool that runs equally well on cheap hardware or Cloud infrastructure. Teams use Graphite to track the performance of their websites, applications, business services, and networked servers. It marked the start of a new generation of monitoring tools, making it easier than ever to store, retrieve, share, and visualize time-series data.

Grafana – The open observability platform

Grafana – Grafana is the open source analytics and monitoring solution for every database. Used by thousands of companies to monitor everything from infrastructure, applications, and power plants to beehives.

Santry – Software errors are inevitable. Chaos is not

Sentry – Error tracking tool for your web apps, mobile apps, and games. Sentry provides self-hosted and cloud-based error monitoring that helps all software teams discover, triage, and prioritize errors in real-time.  One million developers at over fifty thousand companies already ship better software faster with Sentry.

Rollbar – Deploy with confidence, more often

Rollbar – Error Tracking Software for various software written on Ruby, Python, JavaScript, else. Spend less time worrying and more time on improving code. With Rollbar, you can feel safe knowing every error is reported in real-time.

Uptime – Website uptime Monitoring Service

Uptime.com – Tool to monitor the uptime of websites, and provides alerts when it goes down. Get website downtime alerts by SMS, phone call or email if your website is down. Uptime.com checks your website availability at one minute intervals from 30 different locations across 6 continents.

Cacti – Complete RRDTool Based Graphic Solution

Cacti – Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring and graphing tool. It monitors network traffic via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with thousands of devices.

Supervisor: A Process Control System

Supervisord –  Tool to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.

Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.

It shares some of the same goals of programs like launchd, daemontools, and runit. Unlike some of these programs, it is not meant to be run as a substitute for init as “process id 1”. Instead it is meant to be used to control processes related to a project or a customer, and is meant to start like any other program at boot time.

Inspectit Ocelot – Collecting Performance, tracing and Business

Inspectit – inspectIT Ocelot is a Java agent that allows you to extract any kind of data and information out of your Java application and consume the data using a big variety of established monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Zipkin, Grafana and many, many more. You can collect for example performance data such as response times and hardware metrics or tracing data that shows you in detail which methods are executed, i.e. what the application actually does or where the errors occur.

RRDtool

RRDtool – RRDtool is the OpenSource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data. RRDtool can be easily integrated in shell scripts, perl, python, ruby, lua or tcl applications.

Zabbix – Networking Monitoring Solution

Zabbix – Enterprise level open source monitoring solution for networks and applications, designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.

Solutions for any kind of IT infrastructure, services, applications, resources

Prometheus – Monitoring System

Prometheus.io – Prometheus monitoring is an open source monitoring and  system time series database. Prometheus fundamentally stores all data as time series: streams of timestamped values belonging to the same metric and the same set of labeled dimensions. Besides stored time series, Prometheus may generate temporary derived time series as the result of queries.

Paessler Router Traffic Grapher or PRT

PRTG – Paessler Router Traffic Grapher or PRTG is a server up-time and utilization, network monitoring and bandwidth usage monitoring too. PRTG monitors your whole IT infrastructure 24/7 and alerts you to problems before users even notice. Find out more about the monitoring software that helps system administrators work smarter, faster, better.

Pandora FMS – Open Source Monitoring Software

Pandora FMS– Pandora FMS is a monitoring software for IT infrastructure management. It includes network equipment, Windows and Unix servers, virtual infrastructure and all different kinds of applications. Pandora FMS has a large amount of features, making it a new generation software which covers all the monitoring issues that your organization may have.

OpenNMS – Network Monitoring and Management Tool

OpenNMS – Free and open-source network monitoring and management tool. Built for enterprises, OpenNMS monitors millions of devices from a single instance. Use the flexible and extensible architecture of OpenNMS to extend service polling and performance data collection frameworks

OP5 – Monitoring and Log Analysis

op5 –  Based on Nagios, It is an open-source network monitoring and server monitoring software. It is free to use. Scalable, Tailor-Made Solutions Providing Near Real-Time Observability and Operational Intelligence Enabling Hybrid IT Automation and Orchestration.

Observium – Network monitoring with intuition

Observium – Observium is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp and many more. Observium focuses on providing a beautiful and powerful yet simple and intuitive interface to the health and status of your network.

Nagios – Network, Server and Log Monitoring

Nagios – IT Infrastructure monitoring tool. It is one of the popular tool. Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party addons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

Munin – Network Resource Monitoring Tool

Munin – Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and “what just happened to kill our performance?” problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned about several Server Monitoring Tools and still, there are various other server tools used in different organizations. Benefits derived and cost involved is completely based on the usage of the tool

Not all Server monitoring tools are capable of monitoring the slow performance, exceptions in the application, response time, restore application server, etc and many organizations use log monitoring and analytics system to overcome such issues.