5 Ways to Improve Your Server Performance Monitoring

Server performance monitoring isn’t something that’s done every once in a while.

It’s a critical function that allows your organization to run smoothly and efficiently. A down server could bring a company to its knees and cost a lot in lost productivity and revenue.

In fact, RAND Corporation found that just one hour of downtime costs businesses $100,000.

You don’t want to be responsible for that level of lost revenue. Not only that, but your server’s performance can have an impact on SEO.

You can prevent downtime and minimize the effects of downtime by monitoring your server’s performance regularly.

Keep reading to learn how you can leverage server performance monitoring to keep your organization running at top speed.

1. Have a Performance Monitoring Plan

Server performance monitoring starts with a plan. If you have a complex web of servers to manage, with a wide range of users. Each type of user has their own needs and you’ll need to take that into consideration.

Do you want to monitor the consumption of server resources? Which systems need to be managed? You may have servers on-site or data in the cloud, operating systems, and business applications that need to be managed.

You’ll need to determine what you want to measure, and you need to be proactive about it.

That doesn’t mean being informed as soon as there’s a problem. You should set up alerts early in the process to mitigate any long-term effects.

Most problems that are identified early on can be handled with automation. Scripts can be executed to handles such issues and then escalated if they don’t work.

2. Measure the Right Metrics

You can have the best server performance monitoring tools, but if you’re not looking at the right information, it becomes useless.

These are the top metrics you need to measure.

Uptime: Uptime is simply how long your server has been running. You want this number to be as big as possible.

Request Per Second: RPS is the number of requests sent to a server every second. This is a good indication of how much load your servers are under.

Average Response Times: Speed matters. Your users expect results in milliseconds. It also matters for SEO. By assessing the average response times, you’ll be able to assess how fast your servers are and identify where improvements can be made.

Error Rate: The error rate is the rate of unsuccessful server requests. For example, if a customer goes to your website and the request times out because the server is slow. That would be a processing error.

Errors do happen and you’ll need to identify the most common ones and eliminate them.

3. Set Up the Right Alerts & Document Everything

As you’re setting up your server performance monitoring system, you need to set up alerts. You don’t want to be the one who sets up so many alerts that you desensitize your team.

They might ignore and not respond to the most critical alerts.

If you have a baseline to work off of, you can set up alerts when your metrics reach a minimum or maximum threshold. Your alerts should also be for items that require action.

You’re also going to want to document everything about your server performance monitoring system.

By having documentation, everyone on your team will know how the system works, and how to resolve issues.

The first thing you’ll need to document is how the alerts are set up. Also, note why they’re set up

Next, you’ll want to document the process to resolve the issues related to the alerts.

Finally, you’ll want to document the value your department brings to the entire business. Let’s face it, people only notice IT when things go wrong.

It’s up to you to show that your department is a critical piece of the organization.

You can do that by setting up automated reports that show the number of alerts and how long it took to resolve them. You can take that a step further and estimate the cost savings to the company.

4. Know How Your Team Communicates

The people in your organization that regularly monitor server performance all have different ways to communicate.

Do they check their emails immediately? Will they respond to text messages?

You’ll need to set up alerts to get their attention.

When you choose a server performance monitoring tool, make sure that you have a wide range of alert options. Email, SMS or phone are all reliable ways to get in touch with your team.

After all, there are more cell phones than humans in the world and they’re likely to respond to one of them.

5. Test Server Monitoring and Speed Up Performance

In this final tip, it’s time to test the monitoring system.

One way to do that is through subdomains that exist for testing purposes. Running your processes and scripts through a subdomain will help you verify the alert and escalation rules you set up.

Once you’ve tested your server monitoring system and let it go live for a while, you’ll notice where there are opportunities to speed up performance.

You might spot an opportunity to speed up server response time or you might see that there are a few database issues that are taking up resources and slowing things down.

By increasing performance using the data you’ve collected, you’re improving the user experience for customers and employees.

Set Up Server Performance Monitoring Tools

The performance of your server is a critical function of your organization, and it’s the reason why you have a job.

You don’t want to let your company down by having unreliable servers that are costly to the organization.

Using the right tools to monitor your server’s performance is just an important as the metrics you use, and the alerts you set up.

SiteUptime will monitor your system’s uptime every two minutes and you’ll get notified if a server is down. You’ll know if there are any issues before anyone else does.

Take a look at our plans and sign up today.