The Importance of Using the Right Sever and Application Monitor Tools

Servers and applications across your private, public, and hybrid clouds require constant monitoring to ensure their peak performance. This is where server and application monitoring tools come in. With the correct tools to monitor how well your servers and applications are performing, you can prevent problems that can lead to downtime and hamper your operations, potentially damaging your reputation and resulting in monetary loss. This article discusses server and application monitoring tools in detail, including their benefits and challenges, and how you can choose the right monitoring tool for your organization.

What Is Server Monitoring Software?

Server monitoring software collects and analyzes various metrics related to your server’s resource utilization. It ensures that applications running on your servers are performing smoothly. If the metrics show that a server’s performance is failing to cope with an application’s demands, the software recommends actions that you can take to alleviate the problem. With server monitoring software, you can act proactively to avert problems before they occur or your users complain of slow application performance.

There are several key components that server monitoring software can keep track of, including:

Why Is Server Monitoring Important?

When your web server goes offline or is serving pages slowly, customers may choose to go to a competitor’s website instead of staying around and browsing some more. An inaccessible file server can lead to the corruption of important records. In the case of the former, you lose potential customers. In the latter case, your internal business operations are disrupted.

The above examples show that your servers are critical components of your IT infrastructure. If server issues are not caught early on, they can result in downtime and customer dissatisfaction. Your organization suffers when your IT infrastructure goes down. Thus, constant monitoring of server performance is needed to ensure that your IT environment can meet user demands.

With server monitoring, key metrics are available for your IT teams to test accessibility and measure the response times of your applications. Also, whenever your server monitoring software detects anything that could trigger a potential error, it sends out alerts to warn your teams of impending disaster and recommends actions to avert the potential impact on your IT infrastructure.

Server monitoring can also predict the future performance of your IT infrastructure in meeting application demands. When done correctly with the right tools, you can plan for infrastructure upgrades without spending too much money at once. You can choose to upgrade the more important pieces of your infrastructure first and leave the less crucial ones for later.

What Is Application Monitoring and What Can It Do?

Other than server monitoring, application monitoring can also help limit the downtime of your business applications. By utilizing the proper application performance monitoring tools, you can keep watch over the health and uptime of your applications and ensure that potential performance bottlenecks are detected before they happen.

With application monitoring tools, you can observe critical components of your applications, including servers and databases, via dashboards and alerts. You can also detect performance anomalies with the help of thresholds and advanced technologies such as pattern recognition. Moreover, you can trace how issues came about, thereby helping you to determine the best courses of action for resolving them.

When looking for an application monitoring tool, you should keep in mind the following capabilities:

What Are the Challenges Most Application Monitoring Tools Face?

Application monitoring may be narrower in coverage these days, affected adversely by microservices and multi-cloud environments, among other technologies. Thus, your applications may not be as widely monitored as before, leaving out important aspects, such as the network and users, from the analysis. This can limit how helpful application monitoring is in ensuring the peak performance of your applications.

Some other difficulties application monitoring tools may encounter include:

What Should You Look for in a Server and Application Monitoring Tool?

Given the challenges of server and application monitoring, what do you need to look for when it comes to selecting server and application monitoring tools?

The more notable features that you should look for in a monitoring tool include:

Monitor Infrastructure and User Performance Easily with Parallels RAS Resource Usage Dashboard

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) makes remote work easier by enabling access to virtual desktops and applications from anywhere and using any device of choice. You can also deploy Parallels RAS to virtually anywhere, including on-premises servers, public and private clouds, or a hyperconverged infrastructure. Parallels RAS secures your data from a central dashboard by monitoring and restricting access to your environment. Moreover, its auto-provisioning capabilities also enable your organization to scale your IT infrastructure quickly and on-demand.

Parallels RAS introduced a feature back in 2017 known as the Performance and Resource Usage Monitoring Dashboard. Now more mature, this feature helps monitor each Parallels RAS component, paying particular attention to their performance and resource usage. With this tool, your administrators can troubleshoot installation issues, analyze performance bottlenecks, track resources usage, and resolve any server misconfiguration.

From the Performance and Resource Usage Monitoring Dashboard, you can generate and view Parallels RAS statistics. From the data gathered, you can analyze and troubleshoot issues related to poor performance, session disconnects, and host-server slowdowns.

See how you can monitor the performance of your Parallels RAS server with the Performance and Resource Usage Monitoring Dashboard.

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