What’s more important than the failure of your servers and websites is the monitoring of them! It’s always best to be in the loop, and that applies to everything in life. The best thing to do right now is to be in the loop in terms of your servers and websites with server/app monitoring applications.

What is Server/App Monitoring?

Server monitoring is as it sounds, it’s an application that monitors your servers. Its main feature is to monitor the system’s resource usage, like status, disk capacity, CPU, memory, etc. This helps you better understand your system and your capacity planning, as well as provide a better end-user experience.

Application Monitoring is a similar process, as it (obviously) monitors your apps, or software applications. It ensures that they process and perform in an expected manner and scope. Routinely, the app monitoring software will identify, measure and evaluate the performance of an app and provide the means to isolate and rectify and abnormalities.

Why you need it!

Server/App monitoring is essential to web hosting customers as although some servers are monitored for you, not all are. So, if an issue is to arise, you’d much rather know all about it yourself, and immediately!

With a server/app monitoring software, you’ll be able to see everything that’s going on with your servers and applications, meaning you’ll be in watching over them like a mother over her children.

What is the best solution for you?

Server and app monitoring products essentially all set out to achieve the same thing, but do it differently; in their own ways. So, I interviewed one of Crucial’s stylish Sales representatives, Tom, for his views on what the three most popular server/app monitoring products are, as well as how they are beneficial to you and your business(es):

“New Relic is different to Zabbix and Nagios, because it’s much better in terms of user-friendliness. It’s simpler and cleaner — their people know all about User Interface (UI) and app development. Their configuration is easy to understand and use, and it’s an out-of-the-box solution, meaning you can start using in minutes.

It’s what everyone uses for app monitoring. Also, a plus is that they host the server monitoring on their servers, whereas, with Zabbix and Nagios, you’ll need to host it on your own server.

It’s basically a different beast in that it gives more drilled down data. The only downside is that it’s a paid product, but there are 14 day free trials offered to those who want to try the product first.”

Summary:

• Simpler and cleaner, in terms of configuration and UI.
• What everyone uses for application monitoring
• Out of the box solution, can use straight away in terms of setup
• Server monitoring is hosted on their servers
• Gives more drilled down data
• Free trials offered, but paid plans required
• It does a lot of cool stuff for you

“Zabbix is simply made by SysAdmins for SysAdmins, but don’t let that scare you off if you’re not too tech-savvy — people are actually seemingly moving over to Zabbix. It’s not an out-of-the-box solution like New Relic, as it can be tailored to your own needs, and doesn’t have the simple startup of New Relic — you can use templates to get you going, but essentially, you kind of have to know about servers to get the best out of it.

One major downside if you’re looking for an easy-to-use app is that Zabbix requires you to host it on one of your own servers (but if you’re tech-savvy enough, this may not be such a problem). But two upsides are that it’s free and open-source!”

Summary:

• By Sysadmins for Sysadmins
• Not so much for application monitoring
• Not out-of-the-box solution
• Can be tailored to your needs
• You kind of have to know about servers to get the best out of it
• Requires you to host on one of your own servers
• FREE
• Open source
• You have to do the cool stuff yourself

“Nagios for a long while was more accepted as the industry standard, mainly because it has been in the market for a lot longer than the other apps. Pretty much, everyone used it. It isn’t necessarily used for application monitoring, and is similar to Zabbix in terms of being less focused on UI and more focused on the nitty, gritty stuff — a SysAdmin’s passion.

It is also considered not much of an out-of-the-box solution and can be tailored to suit your needs. It also requires you to host it on your own servers — along the same lines as Zabbix. The upside is that it’s free as well as open-source!”

Summary:

• More accepted as the industry standard
• Not so much for application monitoring
• Can be tailored to your needs
• You kind of have to know about servers to get the best out of it
• Requires you to host on one of your own servers
• FREE
• Open source
• You have to do the cool stuff yourself

Conclusion:

Overall, we choose Zabbix, as, well, we have SysAdmins, and they know what they’re doing in terms of server monitoring. We use it for internally for all monitoring of all things, but we also use as more of an on-demand option.

For our customers, we stress that going for the cheaper option like Zabbix or Nagios is more cost-efficient, but will require knowing a bit about servers, as well as patience if you don’t know a thing!

If you’re not bothered with anything techy, you could go for New Relic, as it seems to be the “Apple” of the industry, with its clean looks and user-friendliness, but does come with a cost.