Whether you run an IT shop of 10 people or the entire department of a fortune 500 company, a server monitoring tool is a tool that you simply cannot do without. On the market today you will find a plethora of options for tools like this and one’s similar, and it’s important to distinguish the one that is the right fit for your current needs and ones that you will have as your company grows and expands. The efficiency, stability and most importantly safety of your company’s servers depend on you making the right decision and learning the tool you purchase quickly and effectively.
As you will find with any software you purchase, regardless of its purpose, the overall intuitiveness of it is a feature that cannot be overlooked. Anyone who uses a large amount and wide variety of different computer software will tell you, we’ve all had that one tool that while we know the functionality makes it an incredible asset, the learning curve was just too large to make it effective right away. It is critical that the main user interface, which tracks the up to the minute health of your server and overall network, is easy enough to learn and ultimately use that you can not only learn it quickly yourself, but be able to teach your employees and new employees how to use it. Most server monitoring tools available today offer some form of a central dashboard that is the face of the software when booting it up. From here, you can visually track everything from bandwidth, to server health to performance metrics on a minute to minute basis.
When researching the best server monitoring for your needs, a tool that offers the ability to set up custom alerts is one that should be strongly considered. One of the biggest reasons for an alert system is for incoming security threats. By having a system in place that sends emails or even SMS text messages to you at the first sign of a potential issue, you can address and ultimately more quickly neutralize the incoming threat to prevent it from spreading and shutting down your operations.
In today’s tech landscape, a feature that is gaining in popularity every year is server monitoring tools that are mobile and tablet friendly. Many of today’s professionals are not only working remotely, but are constantly on the go making traditional server monitoring more and more difficult. Having the ability to check on the overall health of your server and speed of your network while on the go, gives you the peace of the mind to always know what’s going on back at the office. Similar in nature to the last feature we mentioned, many mobile applications also give you the ability to set up alerts and notifications from directly within the app. Convenience is something that cannot be replaced or imitated.
Before purchasing your server monitoring software, it’s also important to make sure that it is compatible with your current suite of tools and has the ability to use add-ons to further its functionality. As is the case with any software you are considering an investment in, it’s always a good idea to look and see if there is a demo version of the server monitoring software you are considering. Not only will it allow you to see if you’re other tools are compatible and run smoothly with it, but it will also give you a general sense of how the software runs before committing to the purchase. Where available, we strongly recommend downloading the demo version of your server monitoring tool before purchasing.