With so many options available on the market today, a server monitoring service is a tool that can be intimidating to purchase. That being said however, it is one that is extremely critical to any IT professional tasked with maintaining the speed and ultimately protecting the safety of their server and network as a whole. When it comes to choosing a server monitoring service that best fits your company’s needs, it’s important to do your research and consider all of the features available to you. In today’s article, we take a look at some of those features to consider in making this long-term investment.
When considering features for your server monitoring service, there is ultimately no substitution for a software that you can pick up and learn quickly. Being intuitive and easy to not only learn but train your staff on, the software becomes that much more valuable as you are wasting little to no time with a learning curve. Maintaining efficiency is very important to the overall health and effectiveness of your server, but maintaining security and safety within your server is even more important. By choosing a user interface with an intuitive dashboard you can become quickly comfortable with, it allows you to quickly identify incoming threats and other potential issues that may slow down your servers and ultimately company operations. Like every software, most server monitoring service tools feature an initial dashboard that visualizes all of the necessary metrics from your server that you will want to be constantly tracking. From graphics, charts and bar graphs that display your server’s data metrics in real-time, to more visualization features that help you to recognize patterns that can lead to potential issues, a solid suite of visualization tools can help the less-experienced members of your IT team recognize issues themselves and make sure your servers stay efficient and safe.
Another feature that is growing in popularity is the ability to offer mobile and tablet support for your server monitoring service. With today’s professionals constantly on the go, this is a feature that many cannot go without. By being able to monitor the overall health and safety of your server while traveling is a convenience that should not be looked past.
An often overlooked yet many times a very important feature to consider when choosing the best server monitoring service for your department’s needs, is the ability to setup custom notifications for everything from potential server speed issues to more importantly, security threats. By setting parameters to receive email or SMS notifications when the software recognizes a specific set of events, you can make sure that it is constantly running at an optimal speed. More critically however, you can also make sure that any incoming security threats are immediately recognized and dealt with before they penetrate your server and cause widespread problems. The difference between immediately neutralizing a threat and missing it by a few hours, can be the difference between no problems and absolute havoc to your server and company.
Ultimately, choosing a server monitoring service tool is a decision that you cannot afford (both metaphorically and literally) to get wrong. With that said, it’s important to consider all the features mentioned above, but also be complete in your research and due diligence. As with many software in today’s tech landscape, we suggest downloading a demo of the software you are considering before pulling the trigger on the investment. Not only will this allow for you to get an overall feel of the aforementioned intuitiveness of the software, but it will also let you see if the software is one that is compatible with your operating system you plan to use with it.