There are hundreds of Web Server Monitoring tools are available in the market. It is really tough to find the best one to monitor your web server or host websites. Here are some best Web Server Monitoring Tools that can help you monitor any type of server including Windows, Linux and Unix.
Gone are the days where you have to dedicate a physical server to monitoring your web servers, or be limited to small 3rd party software that only functions with certain popular web servers. With our top five list of best web server monitoring tools which includes their high level features and benefits, anyone can effortlessly decide on the right tool for the job!
Sematext
Sematext is a cloud monitoring tool that offers a complete suite of solutions for infrastructure and application performance monitoring, log management, synthetic monitoring, and real user monitoring that provides real-time observability for the entire technology stack. Over 10,000 organizations depend on it, including some of the world’s largest companies.
Sematext provides full-stack infrastructure monitoring solutions that provide visibility into both on-premise and cloud deployments. It allows users to see the health of the infrastructure by providing information on applications, servers, containers, processes, databases and much more.
Sematext helps identify the root cause of infrastructure issues, troubleshoot and debug faster and ensure peak performance across the entire stack using fully customizable monitors and alerts.
Users can map and monitor their full infrastructure in real-time using the lightweight agent that can be installed on bare metal, VMs, and Docker. This allows to take full advantage of the dozens of cloud-ready integrations that provide a clear understanding of what’s happening under the hood.
Sematext is not free of charge, but the pricing is very reasonable. We recommend taking a look at the 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
Nagios XI
A list of tools server monitoring software, would not be complete without Nagios. It’s a reliable tool to monitor server health. This Linux based monitoring system provides real-time monitoring of operating systems, applications, infrastructure performance monitoring, and systems metrics.
A variety of third-party plugins makes Nagios XI able to monitor all types of in-house applications. Nagios is equipped with a robust monitoring engine and an updated web interface to facilitate excellent monitoring capabilities through visualizations such as graphs.
Getting a central view of your server and network operations is the main benefit of Nagios. Nagios Core is available as a free monitoring system. Nagios XI comes recommended due to its advanced monitoring, reporting, and configuration options.
WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold is a well-established monitoring tool for Windows servers. Due to its robust layer 2/3 discovery capabilities, WhatsUp Gold can create detailed interactive maps of the entire networked infrastructure. It can monitor web servers, applications, virtual machines, and traffic flow across Windows, Java, and LAMP environments.
It provides real-time alerts via email and SMS in addition to the monitoring and management capabilities offered in the integrated mobile application. The integrated REST API’s features include capabilities such as integrating monitoring data with other applications and automating many tasks.
WhatsUp Gold provides specific monitoring solutions for AWS, Azure, and SQL Server environments. These integrate with native interfaces and collect data regarding availability, cost, and many other environment-specific metrics.
Prometheus and Grafana
Prometheus and Grafana are two of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools currently available, very popular for server monitoring needs. You’ll need to install a slew of data-gathering agents known as exporters to send metrics to Prometheus, while Grafana lets you create stunning dashboards using those metrics.
Setting up a full-fledged server monitoring system using Prometheus and Grafana requires a good amount of configuration and complexity because this is a DIY solution. Still, if you have the right skills, it can be a piece of cake. One of the key benefits is that Prometheus will be running on your infrastructure, meaning you won’t be shipping your metrics to a third-party vendor.
Server monitoring alerts are supported by both Grafana and Prometheus, with multiple channel integrations including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, and a few others.
Prometheus and Grafana are a potent open-source combination giving you significant flexibility with a backend that provides excellent server performance monitoring.
Pros
- Free and open-source with a huge open-source community for support
- Automatic service discovery and support for both push and pull metric scraping models
- Support for custom metrics; huge number of exporters available to export metrics to Prometheus from different sources
Cons
- Complex and time-consuming to manage Prometheus instances; operational overhead if your staff is unfamiliar with the tool
- Need to manually configure and manage Prometheus exporters
- Manual setup required for graphs and alerts
Pricing
Prometheus and Grafana are free and open-source server monitoring tools.
Monit
Monit not only monitors your server, but also attempts to remedy problems by taking predefined actions for certain situations. For example, if your database server crashes, Monit can automatically restart the service if this is the action that you want to take (hint: it usually is).
If you have more than one server that you need to monitor, then you can use M/Monit– an extended version of Monit that provides a simple way to monitor multiple machines.
There’s also an iPhone app available for M/Monit to help you conveniently check on your network without lugging around a laptop around.
Ganglia
When you have a cluster of machines, it’s difficult to see how the whole cluster is doing all at once. Ganglia, instead, presents an overview of the whole cluster. This is a great tool to have set up when you’re working with a server cluster; with that said, it may be overkill for single-machine set-ups.
SolarWinds Server & Application Manager
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a reliable monitoring service for virtual servers across cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Depending on your environment, it offers an understanding of your server usage metrics together with application performance metrics.
The solution is a fantastic candidate to monitor not just your servers but your entire infrastructure. Capabilities include automatic server services monitoring, remote server monitoring, server health monitoring, server application monitoring, server inventory monitoring, and server process monitoring. You get coverage for containers, databases, and applications with alerts and 1,200+ dashboards out of the box.
Pros
- End-to-end monitoring support with correlated metrics
- Automatic service discovery and application dependency mapping
- Support and recommendations for server capacity planning
Cons
- No anomaly detection for alerts
- No support for identity federation with LDAP
- Generic and limited reporting filters in the dashboard
Pricing
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor charges on a per-host, per-month basis. There is also a 30-day free trial.
Conclusion
We have tested hundreds of web server monitoring tools to create this list, all are offered completely free with no required contract. Find the right one for you