Linux Server Monitoring

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Performance Monitoring for Linux Servers

Linux Server Monitoring
Linux-based servers are being widely used by many enterprises to power their data centers. Monitoring server hardware, the server hardware, and critical parts of the server operating system including the processors, memory, disk, and network interfaces is essential for ensuring that the applications running on these servers are working efficiently at all times.

eG Enterprise offers 100% web-based Linux server monitoring and application performance monitoring. Various Linux variants including Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and CentOS can be monitored by eG Enterprise. Using a web-based console, administrators can track the status of their heterogeneous Linux server farms, receive alerts when problems happen, view reports on historical performance, and plan the capacity of their server farms.

To monitor a Linux server, you need to deploy the eG agent software. The agent deployment takes at most a couple of minutes, and soon as the agent is started, it can start monitoring the Linux server hardware, operating system and application processes with little configuration. Baselines for all the collected metrics are pre-defined in eG Enterprise based on industry standard best practices, so you can start receiving alerts when a process fails, a critical event is logged in the server log, or when a disk fills up. If you are interested, the same eG agent can be upgraded to monitor critical public domain applications such as Apache web servers, MySQL databases, and Jboss or Tomcat web application servers running on the Linux servers. Commercial applications hosted on Linux such as Oracle database servers, WebLogic or WebSphere application servers, and others can also be monitored using eG Enterprise. For a complete list of supported platforms, click here.

The Linux server monitoring can be done in an agent-based or in an agentless manner, and administrators can pick and choose the servers that have to be monitored with agents (e.g., critical production servers) and those that can be monitored in an agentless manner (e.g., staging servers). The monitoring system is licensed per server OS, and not based on the number of CPU cores or sockets, or based on the applications running on it.

With its ability to monitor 10+ operating systems including Microsoft Windows 2008, 2003, 2000, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HPUX, OS/400, and OpenVMS, eG Enterprise provides a single pane of glass from where administrators can monitor their heterogeneous multi-vendor data center servers from a single console.

What the eG Linux Server Monitor Reveals

Capability Metric Description
CPU Monitoring CPU utilization per processor of a server
. Know if a server is sized correctly in terms of processing power;
. Determine times of day when CPU usage level is high;
  Run queue length of a server
. Determine how many processes are contending for CPU resources simultaneously;
  Top 10 CPU consuming processes on a server
. Know which processes are causing a CPU spike on the server;
  Top 10 servers by CPU utilization
. Know which servers have high CPU utilization, and which ones are under-utilized;
Memory Monitoring Free memory availability
. Track free memory availability on your servers;
. Determine if your servers are adequately sized in terms of memory availability;
  Swap memory usage
. Determine servers with high swap usage;
  Top 10 processes consuming memory on the server
. Know which processes are taking up memory on a server;
  Top 10 servers by memory usage
. Know which servers have the lowest free memory available and hence, may be candidates for memory upgrades;
I/O Monitoring Blocked processes
. Track the number of processes blocked on I/O;
. Indicates if there is an I/O bottleneck on the server;
  Disk activity
. Track the percentage of time that the disks on a server are heavily used;
. Compare the relative busy times of the disks on a server to determine if you can better balance the load across the disks of a server;
  Top 10 processes by disk activity
. Determine which processes are causing disk reads/writes;
Uptime Monitoring Current uptime
. Determine how long a server has been up;
. Track times when a server was rebooted;
. Determine times when unplanned reboots happened;
  Top 10 servers by uptime
. Know which servers have not been rebooted for a long time;
Disk Space Monitoring Total capacity
. Know the total capacity of each of the disk partitions of a server;
  Free space
. Track the free space on each of the disk partitions of a server;
. Proactively be alerted of high disk space levels on a server;
Network Traffic Monitoring Incoming and outgoing traffic
. Track the traffic into and out of a server through each interface;
. Identify servers and network interfaces with maximum traffic;
Linux Network Monitoring Packet loss
. Track the quality of a network connection to a server;
. Identify times when excessive packet loss happens;
  Average delay
. Determine the average delay of packets to a server;
  Availability
. Determine times when a server is not reachable over the network;
TCP Monitoring Current connections
. Track currently established TCP connections to a server;
  Incoming/outgoing TCP connection rate
. Monitor the server workload by tracking the rate of TCP connections to and from a server;
  TCP retransmissions
. Track the percentage of TCP segments retransmitted from the server to clients;
. Be alerted when TCP retransmits are high and therefore, are likely to cause significant slowdowns in application performance;
Process Monitoring Processes running
. Track the number of processes of a specific application that are running simultaneously;
. Identify times when a specific application process is not running;
  CPU usage
. Monitor the CPU usage of an application over time;
. Determine times when an application is taking excessive CPU resources;
  Memory usage
. Track the memory usage of an application over time;
. Identify if an application has a memory leak or not;
Server Log
Monitoring
New events
. Obtain details of the events in the system logs files (/var/adm/messages, sulog, syslog, etc.);

Benefits of Using the eG Linux Server Monitoring Tool

Remotely monitor your Linux server farm - from anywhere, at any time, using a web console 
Receive proactive alerts that help you detect and correct problems with your Linux servers network and applications before users complain 
View historical reports about your Linux servers that help you determine where your bottlenecks are when you need to plan for capacity
Simple, easy to user interface ensures that your Level-1 support staff can effectively handle customer trouble calls and call your expert Linux administrators only for solving complex problems

For a comparison of eG Enterprise with public domain Linux monitoring packages, click here>>


 
                                
 
Feature Summary Platforms Unix Monitor