October 24, 2022

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5 Must Have Monitoring Tools for Your VPS

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Before you launch a website on a new VPS (Virtual Private Server), you’d want to make sure that it will give you the best possible hosting environment. It is crucial to ensure that the technologies powering your website are well supported, which may involve quite a lot of preparation and work. Amidst this, you may overlook the fact that setting up a few monitoring tools is equally important to run a website successfully. These tools can be categorized into:

Categories of VPS Monitoring Tool

1. Application monitoring tools

These tools help ensure that your website has great loading speed and consistent performance.

2. Website and blacklist monitoring tools

IP blacklisting monitoring tools check the block lists periodically and alert you if the IP address of your server shows up as one of them, so that you can take remedying actions immediately.

3. Network monitoring tools

These tools keep a check on all the aspects of your server’s connection to the outside world. And if they detect any issue, they alert you immediately. Now, let us walk you through some of the most popular and useful monitoring tools.

Best monitoring tools for your VPS

Before choosing any tool, you need to thoroughly analyze all the different options, the platforms they support, the features they offer, and their price points. We’ve listed below some of the most popular tools:

1. Checkmk

Checkmk is an extensive application monitoring solution that can work on virtual and physical servers, application servers, cloud infrastructures, database servers and other such platforms. It is a free and open-source tool that supports most of the platforms and helps you manage your VPS by performing 1800+ smart checks. Checkmk is easy to configure and has a range of network mapping and automatic discovery capabilities.

2. OpenNMS

OpenNMS provides server administrators with a management platform that covers all the aspects of the FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting performance, security) model. In terms of monitoring, it can keep an eye on thousands of data points and give you accurate information on the availability and usage of any protocol or online service you can think of. This is due to its customizability and easy integration with various other popular tools.

3. Netdata

Netdata is an excellent single-node monitoring platform that helps track everything from CPU load, disk usage, and bandwidth to website analytics, the relationships between the applications on your server, its running services and operating system. Furthermore, it offers easy integration with an intuitive interface and hundreds of different setups that collect and organize the data. In addition to the self-hosted version, you can choose Netdata Cloud – a closed-sourced edition offered under the software-as-service model. It is better suited for entire servers’ networks. Though it is free to use currently, the developers of the platforms will soon launch the paid version with advanced features.

4. Icinga

Icinga’s recent versions are more user-friendly than the previous ones and come with enhanced database monitoring and various other features like REST API integration. Its design allows you to create custom checks and has a notification system and web-based interface that organizes and arranges the data in an easy-to-use, comprehensible dashboard. Icinga is completely free of charge. But if you’d need technical assistance to make the most of its features, you will have to pick a premium support plan.

5. Zabbix

Zabbix, an open-source platform, was designed ground up to be a reliable tool to monitor and control all types of IT systems, including cloud services, physical and virtual servers, and networks. If you install it on your VPS, you’ll be able to track the disk space, network usage and CPU load. Zabbix also supports custom configurations that are based on XML templates. You can use it to perform regular checks and ensure that vital services like SSH and TCP are online. Zabbix has numerous options for alerting you in case one of them disrupts. You can even set it up on a separate server and inform your VPS Hosting remotely.

Conclusion

VPS gives you numerous reliability and speed advantages and is worth the price it comes for. You can easily manage the server with the tools we have listed above. You just need to thoroughly understand the features of the tools and choose the ones that can make your VPS management a lot easier. Even if you do not find them user-friendly, you can opt for managed VPS services. Bluehost offers best-in-class managed WordPress Hosting & VPS hosting services as an add-on to existing or new VPS products. Herein, you get round-the-clock advanced expert support & solutions, including server setup, hardening, migration, proactive monitoring, and a customized server eco-system.

Rahul Sharma

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