5 Benefits of Server Monitoring

Server monitoring can be somewhat misunderstood by non-technical employees. They may believe that their activities are being watched, or that the company is adopting a “Big Brother” attitude. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Server monitoring is there to ensure a healthy network and to keep the servers and workstations in top shape. The solution is there to help busy system administrators cope with their workloads, not to snoop on employees.

Let’s look at five benefits server monitoring brings to an organization.

1)      Get complete visibility into your network health and performance

Server monitoring lets the IT administrator, “look under the hood” and closely examine the issues which could impact network performance. It can look at a variety of variables and show you, in real-time, how your server and workstations are functioning. In this way you can quickly identify any areas that are in need of attention and take appropriate action. Thus, server monitoring allows you to take a proactive approach to problem resolution and to fix any issues before they impact your network’s performance.

2)      Automate a huge variety of checks on your network

Hard disk space and performance, scheduled backups, antivirus software updates, critical events and Windows services disruptions – all of these can be automatically checked using a server monitoring solution. This frees up a large amount of time for busy system administrators who no longer have to spend time trying to locate potential issues. Instead they can focus on the servers which need their attention, quickly homing in on the source of an issue. In addition, the checks that a server monitoring solution runs are also customizable.

3)      Know what is happening on your network

You can set alert levels and be notified by email and text messages when the server monitoring solution finds something amiss. This allows you to rapidly respond, even if you are out of the office. By being alerted to potential issues, you can take action before they impact your network performance, or result in downtime for your servers or workstations. This keeps your organization’s productivity at an optimum level.

4)      Scalability

You can quickly view a full list of computers covered by your server monitoring solution and add in new workstations should you need to. This means your solution can scale as the company grows. Cloud-based server monitoring solutions are very flexible and allow you to add services and machines with ease and without complex processes. Cloud-based solutions also have the advantage that they do not require constant patching or updating by the IT administrator, saving both time and costs. The cloud services vendor takes care of this for you.

5)      Frees up your IT resources

By taking over many of your server monitoring tasks, this solution allows you to reallocate your IT resources and time to other higher value tasks such as development, or infrastructure renewal. Not only does the software watch over the system, but it can even perform some remedial actions, such as a server reboot or automatically restarting a service.

Server monitoring solutions offer a wide range of benefits to system administrators. In fact, it is almost like having another employee in your IT department, except this one never sleeps. Once you start running a server monitoring solution on your network, you’ll wonder how you managed without it.

This guest post was provided by Mark Williams on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more on what to look out for in a server monitoring solution.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.