The Top 5 Server Monitoring Mistakes to Avoid
Server downtime does happen. And it is a nightmare for many webmasters. For enterprises, it costs brand reputation and hundreds to thousands of dollars’ worth of lost business transaction. And the worst part is when you realize it is your fault why the server crash happened, when in fact you could have prevent it from happening if only you did best practices in managing your server performance monitoring.
You simply have to set up top notch server performance monitoring solution to keep this nightmare from happening. Plus, a good dose of reminder on few mistakes you must avoid. So then, for a fast server and uptime, here are the top 5 mistake to avoid in server performance monitoring.
1. Not checking all my servers
The first mistake in server monitoring is blatantly not monitoring your servers. Most often, webmasters fail to monitor the secondary DNS and MX servers. This mistake makes the perfect nightmare when your primary servers go offline. Another oft-overlooked server is the cloud. Because cloud servers are fast and easy to set up, many fall into the pit of forgetting to set up the necessary monitoring solutions.
2. Inadequate monitoring
Even when you successfully secure a server monitoring system, common problems arise when the monitoring system is inadequately doing its job. There are monitoring solutions that only check the ping results, but you want a system which checks for each server and on all critical services e.g the DNS, SSH, Web and MySQL.
Along with the scope of your monitoring solution, the frequency of monitoring is another concern. A 10 minute interval is too long as it leaves a huge gap on which a problem may occur. Top notch server monitoring system advises a 1-minute interval which give you only a few seconds of monitoring gap.
3. Not choosing or configuring the Correct Notification Types
If you dodged the mistake of sending notification to the wrong person, you might fail to configure the right type of notification when alerts are triggered. Many webmasters choose email as the primary mode of alert. But oftentimes notifications do not reach the intended people at the right time. Or worse, the email server may also be down and the notifications get delayed further. Hence, the best thing to do is to ensure that critical notifications are sent not only through email but also through SMS, push notifications or voice call.
4. Discrepancies in Timeout setting
The response time of your web page is crucial for your customers. It dictates whether they’ll scan your page or will close the tab. Thus, setting the correct timeout is important. Some source point out that the average load time for a website is between 9.82 and 13.84 seconds. But you want your website to load faster than the average. Many organization err in setting timeouts too long or too soon. So if your target website speed is 5 seconds, your timeout is ideally set at 6 seconds.
5. Too high or low sensitivity
False positives are a perennial problem among webmasters who use automated monitoring tools. Receiving a notification that the website is down, then later followed by another alert that it’s up & running can be too annoying. The mistake here most often is the sensitive calibration of the monitoring solution. Setting it too sensitive to the slightest glitch and you’d receive false positive alerts, but setting the sensitivity too low and you’d run into legitimate downtime that took too long to receive a response.
Author Bio:
Darrell Smith is a data / cybersecurity news junkie. He spends most of his time surfing the web for the latest data and network operations center trends. He also shares his recent findings through his articles and other blog posts.
