Server monitoring is the difference between detecting a problem before your clients notice and learning about an outage from an angry phone call. A well-designed monitoring strategy gives you visibility, alerting and historical data for capacity planning.
What to Monitor
Focus on key metrics: CPU usage (alert at > 80% sustained), RAM utilization (> 90% is critical), disk I/O wait time, network throughput and application response times. Track both averages and peaks — a server that spikes to 100% CPU for 10 seconds every minute is a problem even if the average looks fine.
Zabbix: Enterprise-Grade Open Source
Zabbix is a fully-featured open source monitoring solution supporting SNMP, JMX, IPMI, SSH and HTTP checks. It includes auto-discovery, escalating alerts, SLA reporting and built-in templates for hundreds of common services. Zabbix scales from a single server to thousands of hosts. Ideal for medium to large infrastructures.
Prometheus + Grafana: The DevOps Stack
Prometheus scrapes metrics from exporters: node_exporter for system metrics, mysqld_exporter for databases, nginx-prometheus-exporter for web servers. Grafana visualizes the data with customizable dashboards and supports alerting via Alertmanager. This stack excels in container and Kubernetes environments.
Uptime Monitoring
External uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot, Better Uptime) checks your services from outside your network — essential for detecting outages that internal monitoring would miss. Set up HTTP, TCP and keyword checks. Configure SMS/call escalation for critical services.
Alert Design
Alert fatigue is real. Configure alerts by severity: critical incidents (service down, disk > 95%) trigger SMS or phone calls, warnings (high CPU, elevated error rates) go to Slack or email. Review your alert rules monthly — if an alert fires more than once a week without action, it is noise.
Conclusion
E24 BALTIC deploys and manages Zabbix or Prometheus/Grafana stacks for clients across the Baltics. We configure dashboards, alert routing and on-call escalation so you get notified about real problems, not noise. Contact us for a monitoring audit.
