In today’s world, setting up and managing many different servers is not a difficult task thanks to the advancement of cloud technology. Various companies maintain multiple servers both in the cloud and in their data centers to meet the ever-increasing demand of users. In fact, as a result of these changes and developments, surveillance technologies have become very important. In this article, we are going to introduce you 5 examples of the best tools and software for controlling and monitoring server performance.

What is server monitoring software?

Monitoring how the server works, how the server resources are used, etc. should be done by analyzing various metrics. Ultimately, monitoring ensures that your programs are running smoothly. Whether your servers have enough resources to run their processes or not is checked using this server monitoring. In other words, server monitoring software monitors the performance of some server hardware and software.

The CPU is one of the parts that these tools monitor. The percentage of CPU usage under normal conditions should rarely be maxed out and should not be pressured. If the CPU is used a lot and is maxed out most of the time, it may indicate that there is not enough storage space on the server. Of course, this issue will be normal if it occurs during peak consumption.

Used memory is another part that the server monitoring software monitors its performance. If the amount of memory used is high, you should increase the amount of server RAM. Storage is another part that the software monitors. It is very important to be aware of your server’s disk storage. If the disks run out of space, the system crashes. Network performance is also affected by conditions. Monitoring bandwidth and network performance is very important.

The best tool for monitoring server performance

In general, there are many software for server management; But each of them is focused on a specific sector. Next, we will introduce 5 examples of the best tools and software for monitoring server performance.

1. Sematext Monitoring

Sematext Monitoring is an integrated monitoring tool for your servers and applications in cloud environments. In this tool, comprehensive and practical dashboards have been designed for metrics, events and logs. This gives you a much better view of your server’s performance. Using Sematext, server processes such as packages and their versions and their installation or uninstallation will be monitored.

This server monitoring tool provides all the features needed for better and faster server troubleshooting in one place. Another point is that Sematext supports all the metrics related to the server you need. CPU, Memory, Disk, storage space, etc. are the hardware that this tool supports to control.

Sematext is not only focused on monitoring and supporting server metrics and has a feature such as Log Auto-discovery, which allows automatic logging, setting reports, alerts, etc. Sematext is a complete platform that has a lot of flexibility and is one of the best tools for monitoring server performance.

Advantages and disadvantages of Sematext

The advantages of Sematext Monitoring include:

• Correlation between program performance
• Data center tracking and analysis reports
• Integration support with all providers
• Attractive graphical user interface
• Support for inconsistency detection and warning

Cited. This tool also has some disadvantages, including the loss of documentation for old agents and limited support for Transactional Tracing.

Sematext price

Sematext Monitoring offers an affordable plan based on the number of accounts. Also, you can use this tool for free for 14 days.

2. Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana are among the open source tools for server performance monitoring. These two tools will take care of your monitoring needs and are very popular. To send metrics to Prometheus, you need to install a number of data collection agents known as Exporters. Meanwhile, Grafana allows you to create attractive dashboards using these metrics.

Setting up a full server monitoring system using Prometheus and Grafana requires configuration and going through a lot of complexities. For this reason, it is referred to as software with a DIY installation method. DIY stands for Do It Yourself and refers to installing in a way that is not well documented.

It’s worth noting that Prometheus runs on your own infrastructure. This is one of the important features of this tool. Alerts from server control are supported by Prometheus and Grafana, integration with multiple channels including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams and others.

Do not forget that the open source feature of these tools will provide you with a lot of flexibility to coordinate with the backend. These two excellent tools will monitor your server performance. If you are looking for server monitoring software and tools, be sure to include Prometheus and Grafana among your options.

Advantages and disadvantages of Prometheus

Advantages of Prometheus and Grafana include free, open source, strong support services, and support for custom metrics. These two tools, like any other tool, also have disadvantages. The time-consuming and complicated management of Prometheus samples, the need to manually configure and manage Prometheus Exporters, and manually set charts and alerts are among the disadvantages of these tools.

Price of Prometheus

As we said, Prometheus and Grafana are free and open source server monitoring tools.

3. SolarWinds Server & Application Manager

SolarWinds Server & Application Manager is a reliable monitoring service for virtual servers, along with cloud technologies, on-premise or hybrid environments. This tool provides server usage and application performance metrics based on your environment.

SolarWinds Server & Application Manager will be among the efficient tools to control not only your servers, but your entire infrastructure. The capabilities of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor are as follows:

• Monitoring server services automatically
• Monitor remote servers
• Check server health
• Check the performance of a list of servers
• Monitoring servers as an explained process

Advantages and Disadvantages

End-to-End monitoring support with correlated metrics and benefit from Automatic Service Discovery and Application Dependency Mapping and providing necessary recommendations for planning according to server capacities are among the important advantages of SolarWinds Server & Application Manager. Some of the disadvantages of this tool are: not detecting inconsistencies for alerts and not supporting identity federation with LDAP and limited and generic reporting filters in the dashboard.

Price

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor subscription fee is calculated per host and per month. Of course, note that you can use its trial mode for free for 30 days.

4. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) server performance monitoring tool. Due to the ability to use the server metrics of this tool, most likely your monitoring needs will be solved to a great extent. Setting up Dynatrace is not difficult, and in just a few minutes you can define your metrics in the available dashboard. Then, get information about CPU, Memory and Network.

One of the interesting features of Dynatrace is that it shows network metrics for specific processes. This tool not only monitors your servers; Rather, it uses artificial intelligence to automatically understand the architecture of your entire application. You can use the Dynatrace tool for monitoring server performance and managing your organization’s cloud infrastructure at the lowest cost.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The benefits of this tool include: access to the On-Premise version and the AIO platform with support for infrastructure control, application performance, business analytics and cloud automation, and AI-based inconsistency detection and alerts. Among the disadvantages of this tool are the limitations of some dashboard functions and the complexity of some sections (you will need training to work with some sections).

Price

Dynatrace charges a specific fee from the consumer on a monthly basis and according to the amount of data received. Of course, you can use the trial mode of this tool for free for 15 days.

5. Datadog

Datadog is one of the efficient tools for controlling infrastructure, applications, networks and logs. One of the important features of Datadog is that it provides a unified view of monitoring metrics related to Log Discovery and Traces. This feature comes in handy when you plan to find and fix performance problems on your servers.

Installing Datadog is very simple and you only need to install the metric collection agent. Once you’ve installed the tool, you’ll see both health metrics and server monitoring using its beautiful dashboard. Alerts are also quite standard and can be easily set up and used.

Advantages and disadvantages of Datadog

The benefits of Datadog tools include support for report aggregation, analysis, inconsistency detection and alerts, and support for custom metrics. Some disadvantages of Datadog are a bit complicated to use for newcomers and new users and limited analysis of logs (for example, no support for JSON logs).

Datadog price

Datadog’s pricing varies and is usually based on the number of agents and hosts installed on the system. It is worth noting that you have to buy each feature separately. You can use this tool on a trial basis for 14 days and monitor an unlimited number of servers.

the final conclusion

Using software to monitor server performance is essential for the smooth running of your programs. The variety of models of these tools is great; For this reason, in this article, we introduced 5 examples of the best tools and software for monitoring server performance. According to your needs, you can choose and use one of these tools.

Of course, note that in order to reduce costs and save time, we suggest using SaaS monitoring software. Among all the introduced options, Sematext Monitoring is considered a perfect option. Undoubtedly, this tool will help you a lot and will make you gain a comprehensive view of your server’s performance.