How to Choose a Server Monitoring Tool—The Success of Your Website Depends on It
If you have ever run a website, you know that success is often determined not by clever design, or valuable content, or carefully calculated user experience. Rather, the success of a website is often determined by something as mundane as being aware of server and network issues when they arise.
Staying on top of problems means being able to solve them before they cause losses, and having the right monitoring tool is indispensable. Here’s how to choose the right tool for your business:
1. Know the Possibilities
Server monitoring tools vary greatly in terms of possibilities, availability, and price range. Usual features include measuring response time, uptime, availability, CPU and memory usage, and free disk space, along with data visualization options, performance benchmarking, detailed reporting, and many other functions. Research what different tools can do, compare the capabilities with what you need, and choose accordingly.
2. Determine Your Budget
IT monitoring tools range from free options to those that cost quite a lot. However, a high price is far from being a surefire guarantee of top-notch quality. Before you decide on a tool, try to understand how crucial it is for the well-being of your company, and determine how much you can invest in server monitoring. Take into account the potential costs of application downtimes caused by lack of efficient monitoring.
3. Select Deployment Variant
The choice is between SaaS (Software as a Service) and on-site installation. Traditionally, SaaS offered less functionality, but recent developments in technology mean that this is no longer always true. Today the choice is more or less an issue of preference, deciding what is more convenient to your business and sifting out some variants to make your choice easier.
4. Go for a Test Drive
Even if a tool seemingly incorporates all the necessary functionality and shows excellent results in a demo situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is going to fare as well in a real operation environment. In order to make sure you don’t pay big bucks for something inadequate, you should test what you buy. Select several monitoring tools that meet most of your requirements, and test them. It is probably going to be difficult to fully install them, so prepare a scaled-down version of your application and try it out with every tool you’ve chosen. You won’t know how something works until you actually start using it.
5. Make Sure You Understand What You Buy
Competition in server monitoring tools is enormous, and providers often offer basic versions of their solutions at low, low prices. However, these basic versions usually contain a bare-bones functionality with most crucial functions reserved for full or premium versions or expensive add-ons. Always make sure you know what exactly is included in the suite you buy to avoid nasty surprises in future.
Server monitoring is an incredibly important aspect of running a website. If having a website is instrumental to running your business, you should pay special attention to it, and make sure you have the necessary tools to do it right.
