All of your questions answered about server monitoring

Here at StatusCake, we get asked a lot of questions about server monitoring, and more specifically, when we know your server has exceeded your set limits, for example. Understanding how we know can show you why server monitoring is so important to your website, and that’s why we’ve collated the most frequently asked questions so you can see for yourself!

Why is server monitoring important to have as a website owner?

Your entire IT infrastructure is heavily reliant on your server’s performance, which means if you have problems with your server, you practically have issues across the rest of your website’s infrastructure. Server issues can lead to prolonged outages impacting your brand, and ultimately, your revenue. 

How does server monitoring work? 

Our server monitoring Knowledge Base article explains this best:

“The Cake agent is designed to be resource-light. The monitoring tool will scan your server over time, and you can monitor your statistics within the application. The agent collects key statistics such as the current RAM, CPU and network usage. We also show you a list of processes running on the machine and the resource that each process is taking.”

What do alerts about my server tell me?

Good question. StatusCake alerts you about your server’s RAM, disk usage, and CPU when they are exceeding their usage. You can set whatever limits you’d like so that when your server reaches them, you’ll automatically get an alert from us. 

Effectively, these alerts tell you that there’s some work to be done to your server to make sure it’s working to maximum potential, and won’t impact your website i.e. website downtime occurrence. 

For example, if your server is continuously exceeding your limits, you’ll know to get your development team on it!

What can I tell from historic data of my server performance?

With StatusCake, we show you any server issues you’ve had over time so you can identify any trends that might be affecting your website. For example, you can analyse if your server is still reaching your set limits after you’ve done a cleanup. 

Do server issues cause website downtime? 

It’s a very interesting question because server issues are the root cause of downtime. We have a lot of customers who experience downtime as a result of their servers experiencing issues. That’s not to say that servers are the sole cause of downtime, page speed and domain issues could also impact your website, but it’s important that you have monitoring in place to combat these problem areas!

What things can I do to clean up my server?

There are plenty of things you can be doing to ensure your server is always running smoothly. For example, you can get rid of any backups that you might have that you no longer need. These take up so much space, and can therefore make you reach your server threshold limits very quickly and easily. 

Another quick win could be getting rid of any third-party products you have. These can take up huge amounts of space on your server, and don’t (normally) require a lot of dev work to uninstall. 

What are confirmation servers?

Confirmation servers are used at StatusCake to ensure that all alerts are valid, when we detect a downtime initially we can optionally confirm that downtime with up to 10 additional and separate servers – this means no false alarms.