Best practices for server monitoring

Adhere to recommended best practices mentioned in this page to proactively identify and address issues, thereby ensuring smooth and uninterrupted server operations.

Prerequisites

Before you set up server monitoring, make sure you have these prerequisites satisfied:

• Allow Site24x7's domains, ports, and IP addresses for a seamless network connection between your servers and Site24x7 data centers.
• Make sure your servers run operating systems (OSs) supported by Site24x7; find the supported Windows OS versions and supported Linux flavors and their respective versions here.

Monitoring best practices

Following these best practices will ensure efficient monitoring of your server environment:

• Provide automation permissions to the agent during installation itself. Enabling them after installation requires the agent to be re-installed.
• Put your server monitors into groups and assign tags for ease of administration.
• Mark the monitors on which your server monitors are dependent to eliminate redundant alerts.
  • For example, consider a Google Cloud organization account that has virtual machines (VMs) with server monitoring agents installed. Mark the server monitors as dependent on the Google Cloud organization monitor so that when the Google Cloud monitor has been terminated and marked DOWN, redundant alerts for the VMs will not be generated.
• Configure a notification profile and associate it with your server monitors to alert the appropriate person at the appropriate time.
• Integrate your third-party notification mediums to get additional alerts apart from the standard alert platforms in Site24x7.
• Enable monitoring for services (Windows) and processes (Linux) running in your servers.
• Integrate IT automation to initiate remediation actions.
• Enable resource checks to get alerts at the file, directory, port, and even firewall levels.
• Edit email templates to customize the alert emails you receive.
• Create custom dashboards to view the metrics critical for your business applications easily.
• Mark maintenance activities and schedules to prevent false alerts.
• Analyze the root cause analysis sent when a monitor is UP to troubleshoot outages easily.
• Set the agents to auto-upgrade so that your agents run on the latest security patches.
• Mark the Site24x7 server monitoring agent as a safe process in your anti-malware programs so it can operate without interruptions.

Threshold best practices:

Site24x7 recommends setting these thresholds for server monitoring: