Monitoring Availability of Servers

Running head: Monitoring availability of servers 1
Monitoring of servers
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Introduction
It administrators should be the inability to use several available tools to monitor the server
around the globe. Historic metrics of the server help administrators to know the trends and the
performance of the server. A good server enables customers to experience your services as they
wanted. The server reports will enable identifying and solving a particular problem within a short
period of time[1] . It can also enable you to prevent future problems in the server. Online enables
one to access reports about uptime and downtime of the server within a particular period of time.
Online tools take snapshots of errors and export data through different formats for easy reading and
analysis by the administrators.
Server monitoring tools
1. Nagios Core
It is the oldest and most popular monitoring tool today. It has plugins which can be easily extended
by any server. It is a Linux based tool meaning it is free and open source tool. It has a good web
interface GUI, presentation of data in form of graphs, alerting through email or text message,
reporting, and configuration. There is an online demonstration tool for the Nagios Core.
2. Ganglia
It is an open source monitoring software for high performing systems. It is a scalable software
whereby it is based on the performance of the clusters. It employs the use of XML for data
representation and XDR for the sending of data[2] . The main purpose of Ganglia is to be able to
analyze algorithms and data structures. It supports both Windows and Linux operating system. Most
of the universities use this tool to monitor their servers.

3. CollectD
It is the most common open source server monitoring tool. It stores statistics of a server in
various formats. It is available for both Windows and Linux operating system. Originally written in
C++. It has a number of plugins which allows for the collection of various data including the CPU
and the memory of the server. It is widely used in the development of the projects field[3] .
4 Spiceworks
Apart from server monitoring functionality, Spiceworks has some additional functionality of IT.
It can provide several functionalities including servers SNMP and services. Spiceworks earns
through the display of ads in the tool. This affects most of the users of this particular tool.
5 Cacti
It is mainly used for front end data. The tools have an external tool that sends data to the metrics
and the data is stored in MYSQL database. It is an open source tool for data logging and
representation of data through graphs. You can customize all types of graphs as long as the data is
available. It requires authentification to access various types of graphs[4]. Many plugins have been
contributed by various developers in the world.
6 Zabbix
It is a Linux based tool meaning it is free and open source. The client-server model is employed
whereby Zabbix clients get all monitoring data from the Zabbix agent. It supports web
configuration, monitoring of performance, application monitoring, alerting through email and text
messaging. Data is normally stored in MYSQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle database.
7 Icinga
It is a Linux based tool, meaning it is free and open source. It comes in two versions, Icinga one and
two. It supports monitoring of performance, alerting through email and messaging, reporting, data
representation through graphs and extensibility through plugins. It functions like Nagios but has