Top 5 server monitoring tools in 2018

Editor @ SquareBoat
Squareboat Blog
Published in
5 min readApr 24, 2018

There is a long list of tools for you to choose from, we bring you five such tools which can help you keep a track of your web and mobile products easily and competently:

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is one of the AWS services that helps monitor all the other services that AWS offers. It can be employed to keep logs, track metrics and set-up alarms for individual and compound metrics that it monitors. Providing a full system view, CloudWatch lets you keep a tab on resource utilization, operational health and performance of an application. Using these features, CloudWatch keeps the system up and running while setting up a swift response arrangement. Laying out a distinct service to its customers, CloudWatch offers support for any operating system which is supported by the Amazon EC2 service.

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Amazon CloudWatch is an infrastructure level support program but provides application monitoring as well, to some amount at least. Users who have enabled CloudWatch can access it either from AWS console or by using APIs and the command line. Monitoring the behaviour of core AWS services registered to the designated account, CloudWatch can trigger alarms if a metric crosses a predefined threshold and notify users through AWS’s Simple Notification Service (SNS). Credibly, CloudWatch can be called a great tool for AWS’s services monitoring.

DATADOG

Designed to assist application developers, IT professionals and other personnel deployed in application operations, Datadog lets its users monitor the performance and health of their web-applications. It also garners data from multiple sources and then converts it into detailed insights for users to understand. Using this data and insights, users can make decisions and create strategies for their product, to improve the services being offered. Multiple third-party integrations are made with the tool to enable a smooth workflow for users, irrespective of the platform they are working on, the location they are in and the language they prefer to use.

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Some of the noteworthy features of Datadog include an easy-to-use framework, information-friendly graphs, alerts and notifications on the basis of tags, a full API access and multiple tools for team collaboration. Also, Datadog provides you with an easy way to compute ratios and integrals with a sampling interval of as low as 10 seconds. While it provides your team with alerts for your products health, it also provides an option to mute all alerts with one click in case of maintenance. The bottom line is, Datadog can prove to be the catalyst your business health needs so dearly.

New Relic

New Relic is designed to help teams make use of the latest technological trends to move swiftly and reduce downtime which in turns improves productivity, rendering a high-performance application. New Relic offers both a free trial and a paid version to its users to try out a small list of features before going all in the tool. With its innovative SaaS model, it can be set up easily with minimal setup time to obtain relevant insights on your product.

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New Relic is a tracking tool which focuses on providing all information easily and efficiently. An easy to understand dashboard provides information such as response time of your product, database monitoring metrics, SQL analysis, weekly performance report, cross-application tracing to track problems in your own application and any other integrated application. New Relic also provides daily, weekly or monthly reports to better analyze your application performance and the current and past trends.

Splunk

Splunk is an easy, secure and quick tool to search, analyse and visualise the huge amount of data generated by applications and software that require an in-depth analysis to understand the health and performance metrics of the product. Splunk collects machine data in real time from the products of their users, which include applications, databases, mobile devices, IoT sensors and virtual machines. The major quality of Splunk is its ability to allow its users to integrate machine data with Hadoop-based data along with data from data warehouses to enrich the primary data for efficient insights.

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Splunk software can take all types of data sources and data types as an input, which makes it an easy-to-use tool. It also allows users to search data in real time to analyse a product’s behaviour and activity, by providing interactive results as a timeline for better understanding. Conclusively, it allows users to set alerts to indicate noteworthy and critical events which can automatically initiate custom actions pre-decided by the user.

Spectrum

Designed to function easily for both the layman and the proficient, Spectrum aims to simplify the monitoring process. Fetching data directly from AWS CloudWatch, Spectrum displays it in real time on its innovative colour-coded dashboard for simple and informative viewing. If you wish to monitor multiple products, Spectrum integrates all your data on a single screen, reducing the hassle required to monitor multiple products.

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Although CloudWatch allows its users to set up triggers and receive alerts for the same, it doesn’t give many options when it comes to the type of notifications one can avail. On the other hand, Spectrum proves its worth in gold by providing more options like phone/web push notifications and with an easy-to-use UI which can be used by anyone. Have many people on your team? No worries! Spectrum enables users to easily add their team members to monitor single or multiple accounts, without any bother. Convincingly, Spectrum is a one-stop solution for your business, especially if you wish to learn your products health but are uninformed with the technical aspect of monitoring. This easy-to-setup tool comes with a long list of features which will make your product’s life easier, irrespective of how tech-savvy you are.

In conclusion, it is important to understand that no two businesses are the same, and it is hard to find a “one size fits all” solution. Therefore, it is important to use a tool which fulfils all your needs at the minimum cost and the lowest amount of hassle. We gave you five such tools which can help your business, let us know which tool you use for your venture and how is it faring for you.

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