How to Monitor a Server with Testomato
Image via Artbrom (flickr)
It's safe to say, server performance is an essential part of keeping applications and websites healthy. Not only does downtime affect business productivity, it also costs you time, money, and in many cases, customers.
Monitoring a server is a great way to avoid performance problems and learn how to improve performance to avoid downtime that affects your projects and business reputation.
What Is Server Monitoring and Why Is It Important?
Server monitoring is way to continuously scan servers for any failures or irregularities that could lead to a failure.
These days, we use the internet, websites, and other online tools on a daily basis. Server downtime can cause a major loss in the productivity at work, but for many of us, it can also impact the quality of service we provide to our customers.
It's important to catch server problems early on to avoid crashes and pick up on issues before they evolve into any major issues that could affect service availability.
Server monitoring is an effective preventative measure for detecting issues before they damage customer experience or effect your own productivity.
How to Monitor a Server with Testomato
You may not know this, but Testomato can be used to make sure your server is up and running. We're able to help you do simple server monitoring with an easy setup and reports to help determine future performance.
Here's an example of how to monitor an SSH server in Testomato:
Login to your Testomato account.
Click a project in your My Projects dashboard or select it from the project menu.
In your project dashboard, click Add test.
Enter the URL of the server you'd like to test and click Submit.
Name your test and click Next.
Uncheck the HTTP status box in Set up test expectations.
Click Save.
If your server goes down, this test will fail (red) and you'll immediately be alerted by email or any PagerDuty alerts you have set up.
We realize that some teams might prefer using a tool that's meant purely for server monitoring. Six Revisions pulled together a great list of free server and network monitoring tools such as Nagios or Monit. It's an older list, but we still feel it's an awesome source for finding a tool that fits your needs.
Extra Tips from Team Testomato
Establish baseline performance metrics. Measure your server performance at various times under different load conditions to help you determine baseline performance. These can be compared with subsequent performance to determine areas that need to be optimized or reconfigured.
Use a hosting service. Don't operate your own server and opt for using a cloud hosting service like DigitalOcean or Rackspace instead. This way monitoring isn't your problem, it's the responsibility of the service and their team.
Switch to the cloud for deployment and testing. Use cloud tools to set up an identical development environment. Adding new technology to your projects is one of the most common reasons for problems, so using a service to help you test these changes before you ship to production can help you avoid unwanted downtime. Some of our favorites are PuppetLabs, Vagrant, and Docker.
How do you monitor your server?
Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook. You can also tweet us directly @testomatocom.