When it comes to setting up your site, there are countless things that need to be taken care: finding your host, designing the site, developing content and so on. Once the site is up, although the difficult work is done, there are still many things that need to be dealt with. The largest of these things being the monitoring of the site, after all, a site that is not up is of no use to you or your users. You may recall awhile back that we looked at a few different monitoring solutions and reviewed one specifically. Since that period a few people have recommended that I look into the solution offered by Power Admin. They offer a number of monitoring solutions but their flagship piece is their server monitoring software.
The good news about this software is that it has a 30 day free trial, and unlike many other pieces out there, it is an actual full trial without any of the “This Feature is Only for Registered Products” or whatever. Installation is pretty straight forward and then the configuration process starts up. Of the monitoring services I have tried out, this one had one of the easier to follow configuration processes and it only takes a few minutes. Once this is finished, the program will populate with details from the server. At this point, those few minutes of work pay off with loads of info (some of which is vital , others may not be of any interest to you).
The server monitor has tons of features to it and can monitor a lot of different things. Here is a list of some of the things it can be used to monitor:
• Event Logs
• CPU, Memory, Network Usage
• Disk Space
• Running Services
• Log Files
• Server and room temperature
• SNMP Object Values
• Running Processes
• Ping Response Time
• Directory Quotas
• Changed files and directories
• FTP Servers
• POP,IMAP and SMTP mail servers
• Web Page content and load times
• TCP port response
• Citrix Monitoring
• And additional resources through user scripts
As many of you likely noticed, we have recently implemented a redesign on our site (at the same time we shifted CMS). So a few of these areas were particularly interesting to check out as I had not done so since things went live.
The page for content and load times is quite nice. In here you enter a specific page you want monitored and it will track the load times over a period of time and allow for the data to be made into a graphical representation. Load times are always of the utmost importance to us, as it is to all site owners, so it is nice to be able to take a look at this data and see how it compares to earlier designs on that page to see what the average response time is. Similarly, the ping response tool was also one of interest to me. It was a pretty straightforward tool with only a few options in it, but it does allow you to schedule a ping test and to graph out the data. The interface feels very familiar and is easy to navigate. Overall the specific tools were very easy to use and their site offers information on how to configure each one if you cannot figure it out on your own.
If you decide to use to register the solution for permanent use, the costs are reasonable. It can be registered for one server at $49, but for larger scale operations can be bought in packages to allow for up to 20 servers to be monitored from a single location. Enterprise licenses are also available if that is of interest to your needs. Before doing any of that though, check out their site and give the software a trial for 30 days.
