8 Best Server Monitoring Tools for Small Business

while auto pilot is one technology we all would love to have everywhere, unfortunately its not so. Server Monitoring tools are a must have for all kinds of businesses running a server.

If you have no idea of the state of your network and the health of your server every day, its like a blind pilot flying through fog heading for a mountain top.

The great news is that in modern day, there are numerous tools for both network and server monitoring that lessen the work on the system admin end.

Majority of businesses rely on server for their daily operations. If the server is not working optimally, then their data is certainly compromised.   Server monitoring tools are the greatest to ensure that both the physical and virtual servers of an organization are functioning well.

Server monitoring softwares are esential tools for System Admins within the organizations. They lessen the burden of management and offer more returns.

They allow for scheduled checks, warnings on server health, and also reporting on the daily activities of the server. With this tools you can check various processes on your server such as;

• CPU usage
• RAM Utilization
• RAID
• Hard disk use
• Warning and health checks
• Storage usage
• Virtual Machines performance

with countless tools both premium and opensource, which server monitoring tools are best for your organization though?

Below is a list of top-leading server monitoring tools that you can adopt for your small business organization in Kenya. This tools are certainly a must consider for any enterprise looking to have its own server environment.

Top 8 Server Monitoring Tools

1. Nagios XI

A powerful networking monitoring tool, that delivers centralized enterprise server, application and network monitoring software. It’s considered cost effective and customization with various third party extension to build and expand on its capacity.

While it’s a widely use Open Source system, the biggest drawback of Nagios is it’s stiff installation curve. it has a complicated installation process since it uses command line. however, admins familiar with Linux standard configurations files should not have any problems working with it.

2. SolarWinds tool

SolarWinds Server monitoring tool is a great tool working on both Linux and windows based servers. They enable system admins to monitor the health of the server by checking the key services and application running on the server.

It lets you monitor hardware such as fan speed, temperature, CPU and also power supply unit performance. with it you can easily trace hardware related issues very fast.

3. Zabbix

A full-scale network and system monitoring tool, written in PHP, and fully equipped with great features. It allows for uptime and response time for remote running applications such as  SMTP.  With Zabbix, you can monitor virtualization hypervisor and web application stacks.

4. Spicework Network Monitor

Spiceworks offers several networking tools. Spicework Network Monitor is a free network and server management tool. The tools deliver real time monitoring abilities and works on both Linux and windows based servers.

Read: How to maintain small business server

The software is scalable and flexible to use providing more ease of use and implementation. it can monitor various devices on the network i.e. printers, switches, copiers and other devices.

It’s biggest drawback is that it fails to reconcile systems that are down. in case the server systems goes down and later on up, the software does not reconcile the change.

5. PRTG

suitable for small environments and right up to large business environments, Paessler PRTG is a network monitoring tool that delivers server, network, cloud application, bandwidth and IT monitoring. The tool offers monitoring of a wide variety of server types such as mail servers, database server, storage servers, and also web servers

6. Monitis

Geared most towards the web server end of things, it provides great server monitoring tools. This includes CPU, Memory, storage and disk monitoring tools including server health checks. works well with both Linux and windows based servers.

7.  Datadog

being cloud based solutions, it allows for entire network monitoring including servers, clouds and applications within the network.  It provides a holistic overview of how components and deployment are performing over the network.

8. Icinga

an open source server monitoring tool that delivers  network, application and server monitoring services, alerting, reporting, graphing. it also allow data export via 3rd Party applications.

Conclusion

Whether you’re running a 5 team size of organization or a full scale enterprise organization, server monitoring is necessary and should not be manually done.  The solutions above are free and also some are premium get what works for you and keep your server healthy.

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