Server Health Monitoring and Reporting
Identify performance issues via in-depth server monitor tools
Comprehensively monitor server hardware health
Get a detailed view of server health check status and performance of your multi-vendor server hardware. SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is designed to proactively notify you before critical server components, such as bandwidth, availability, and response time, negatively affect server performance. SAM is also a server health monitor built to monitor hardware metrics like fan speed, temperature, power supply, battery, CPU, and hard drive status, so you can quickly identify and resolve server hardware issues.
Using SAM, you can quickly identify and resolve server hardware issues for Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, IBM eServer xSeries servers, Dell PowerEdge Blade, HP BladeSystem enclosures, Nutanix, Cisco USC, Microsoft Windows Server, and VMware vSphere hypervisor.
Manage capacity alongside server system health monitoring metrics
SAM server health monitor provides built-in capacity forecast charts and metrics designed to help you more easily identify when server resources reach warning and critical thresholds, so you can find and fix server capacity issues before they affect end-user productivity and business performance.
SAM also enables you to gain insights into peak and average capacity over time, which can allow you to make capacity and resource utilization forecasts more accurately.
Generate server health monitoring dashboards
You can configure SAM to generate dashboards displaying visualizations of your server CPU health check metrics, server system health monitoring data, and more. These built-in dashboards can show the relationships between specific infrastructure components for each application, which can help you better understand your server health and detect issues that could indicate larger problems. You can also drill down further to identify the root cause of issues and prevent similar problems from arising later.
SAM can also map dependencies between applications and the infrastructure supporting them, so you can better understand how health status of devices may be related and more effectively troubleshoot problems.
Perform remote server hard drive health analyzer tasks
SAM server system health monitoring tools are designed to enable you to manage server health services, view information more easily on stopped or running services, and start, stop, or restart services. SAM is also designed to reboot servers remotely with a single click and allow you to view Windows event logs in real time. Monitoring server hard drive health via SAM can help you troubleshoot and handle errors faster.
What is server health?
Server health refers to how efficiently a given server completes day-to-day tasks. If your server is healthy, its operations are running smoothly and consistently—conversely, an unhealthy server could result in issues like latency, failure, and inaccuracy. These can affect other parts of your network, including individual devices, computers, websites, and other hardware and software nodes.
Server health can be compromised by problems like overtaxed CPU, overloaded disk or memory space, or faulty power supply. Even environmental issues, such as fan or voltage failure and increased server temperature, can negatively affect server health. It’s important to view these metrics, along with your server’s resource utilization, by performing a server CPU health check. A server CPU health check is designed to gather data on CPU load, memory used, and disk capacity.
Server health monitoring can be essential to discovering server health information and keeping track of it to gain real-time and historical server health status updates. Historical baselines can also help you make forecasts and determine when resources will reach capacity. This way, your IT team can prepare for future capacity demands and implement any necessary modifications.
What should be monitored on a server?
Monitoring server health using a specialized server health monitoring tool can help you more easily identify and resolve server issues by providing deeper performance insights and the ability to create reports and alerts to improve your ability to quickly troubleshoot problems. Other features to help you monitor search health more effectively include:
- Track key hardware metrics, such as fan plus power supply status, and performance issues resulting from hardware failure
- Generate predefined and custom server health reports for insights into hardware procurement, resource utilization, device status, and more to help you make more informed hardware purchases and other optimization decisions
- Configure alarms in the hardware health monitoring tool to inform you of changes in server health as soon as they happen, so you can quickly resolve issues and maintain server health
- Calculate and set baseline metrics for different monitoring views to help provide context for collected server health monitoring metrics and can be used to set thresholds that trigger alerts when metrics fall above or below
- Use visualizations to gain point-in-time information and correlate both historical and real-time server health data, which can be compared more easily for deeper server health insights
- Gain a better understanding of performance across your environment by enabling monitoring across multiple nodes (a node is anything considered an endpoint of a given network, and nodes can connect to other nodes using HTTPS) for an all-encompassing health overview
Why is server health monitoring important?
Server health monitoring can help you better understand server health and performance both in real-time and historically. This understanding can enable you to spot and address current issues and dig deeper into previous issues to prevent similar complications from arising in the future.
Not effectively monitoring your server health can put your business at risk—enterprises can lose resources, revenue, and even customers when servers and network applications have problems. However, checking server health by generating server health reports, using graphs to visualize performance more easily, and configuring alerts to automatically notify of potential server health problems can help you detect issues before they compromise functionality.
Server health monitors can support helping you more easily analyze server hard drive health stats from across your IT environment. These server hard drive health analyzers are designed to interpret performance data, so you can expedite problem-solving efforts and proactively prepare for similar issues in the future.
Monitoring server health can save your business time, energy, money, and resources by helping you detect and remediate issues to prevent or minimize server malfunctions. You can also use server health monitoring information to make more informed decisions about future server performance optimizations, modifications, and expansions.
How does server health monitoring work in SAM?
Server health monitoring in SAM uses dashboards built to display critical server health monitoring information through intuitive charts, graphs, and other visualizations. SAM can also generate capacity forecast charts to help you more easily identify when server resources reach warning and critical thresholds.
SAM is designed with an easy-to-use interface that allows you to monitor server performance from a single console and more easily perform a Windows Server health check, SharePoint health check, and SQL Server health check by generating performance reports. SAM is built to help you manage multi-vendor infrastructure, including Cisco UCS, Dell, HP, IBM, and VMware hosts.
SAM is designed to notify you of critical server health status updates—Up, Warning, Critical, or Unknown. To enable server system health monitoring for a particular node, you can select the Health Sensors box through clicking List Resources on the Management resource tab. This action allows you to verify server health statistics for your collected nodes.
SAM is also built to generate baselines, which can be used to set standard values and thresholds to trigger alarms when metrics stray for each component that breaches. These alarms and alerts can help you more effectively stay on top of server health.
SAM supports your ability to monitor and improve server health more easily by allowing you to remotely use built-in server management actions to resolve common performance problems, including:
- Real-Time Process Explorer to identify resource hogs and kill processes affecting server performance
- Service Control Manager to manage services on your monitored servers, view information on stopped or running services, and take action to start, stop, or restart services
- View Windows event logs in real-time for error handling and faster troubleshooting
- Reboot servers remotely with a single click
SAM is a server health monitor designed to show relationships between applications and infrastructure components, enabling you to more easily correlate server health with performance problems and identify the root causes of issues to help minimize application downtime across multi-vendor environments.
- What is server health?
- What should be monitored on a server?
- Why is server health monitoring important?
- How does server health monitoring work in SAM?
What is server health?
Server health refers to how efficiently a given server completes day-to-day tasks. If your server is healthy, its operations are running smoothly and consistently—conversely, an unhealthy server could result in issues like latency, failure, and inaccuracy. These can affect other parts of your network, including individual devices, computers, websites, and other hardware and software nodes.
Server health can be compromised by problems like overtaxed CPU, overloaded disk or memory space, or faulty power supply. Even environmental issues, such as fan or voltage failure and increased server temperature, can negatively affect server health. It’s important to view these metrics, along with your server’s resource utilization, by performing a server CPU health check. A server CPU health check is designed to gather data on CPU load, memory used, and disk capacity.
Server health monitoring can be essential to discovering server health information and keeping track of it to gain real-time and historical server health status updates. Historical baselines can also help you make forecasts and determine when resources will reach capacity. This way, your IT team can prepare for future capacity demands and implement any necessary modifications.
"We’re able to automate and alert on hardware components in SAM, and we find out in the afternoon about a bad fan rather than at midnight, it gives the operations team time to work on more important items."
Napoleon Crowe
Systems Architect
FPP Business Services
Automate server health monitoring
Server & Application Monitor
- Discover and start monitoring your multi-vendor servers for performance and availability issues
- Receive alerts and reports for real-time and historical health status updates
- Drill down into details, identify root causes of issues, and make accurate capacity forecasts
Starts at $1,813
SAM, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform
