How to install Splunk Universal Forwarder | Splunk Installation | Log Server What Is Server Monitoring? Server monitoring is the process of gaining visibility into the activity on your servers — whether physical or virtual. Servers are devices (or increasingly, applications) that store and process information that is provided to other devices, applications or users on-demand. A single server can support hundreds or even thousands of requests simultaneously.

As such, ensuring that all of an organization’s servers are operating according to expectations is a critical part of managing your IT infrastructure. The term “server monitoring” is complex because of the exceptionally wide range of servers that exist.

A web server can be a physical device, but it increasingly refers to a virtual server housed on a physical machine shared by dozens of other clients, each running their own independent web server system. Mail servers, print servers and database servers are just a few types of server devices and software.

Monitoring and alerting to issues on these various servers each requires a specific type of technological oversight, and the typical “off the shelf” server monitoring tool is unlikely to be appropriate for every one of them. In this article, we’ll help explain how various server monitoring tools and monitoring services work, the value they bring to the enterprise, and how to go about selecting the right system for your organization.

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