Bobcares, a global leader in providing professional 24/7 Technical Support and Server Management, Software Development and Phone Support services to ISPs, Web Hosts and Data Centers announces a brand new iPhone application. The app is a well tailored solution for server monitoring and management.

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Imagine a server than keeps crashing every other day. For most webhosts’ this isn’t something too hard to imagine. Every host would have gone through this phase, where they are clueless as to why their server keeps going down.

Most of the time, the blame falls on faulty hardware. Usually this is true, circumstantial evidence proving that no recent changes were made to the software, and hence the source of issue would most likely be hardware. This doesn’t always have to be correct, as there are other things that could go wrong.

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I’m sure you’ve all read about how important it is for your customers to optimize their sites for search engines. But have you realized that, as a Webhost, you too play an important part in getting better search engine rankings for the sites you host? Your customers may be putting in a lot of effort into optimizing their site, but without your help, they wont get the results they expect! Lets take a look how you can effect their rankings.

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As always, the more you know about your server, the better. That is one mantra valid all throughout the Web-Hosting business. Once you have this clear, you will understand why we have so many monitoring tools, excelling in their own way. The better they give you information about your server, the better they are. As each monitoring tool gives information as they see important, depending on more than one single tool to monitor your server is not at all a bad idea. On the other hand, the closer you keep track of your server; that too from various angles, will put you in a much better off position. Now lets check what are the situations when you need to be notified.

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It would be a crime to claim to be a person who is interested in Open source monitoring systems, and then not talk about Zenoss. So, even though I had started the deep dive into CRMs, I thought It is my duty to come back and give it the proper respect that it deserves.

Monitoring tools have been there for a long long time. In that time they have built a large user base. The longer the users have been using the product, the tougher it is to break into the already existing market. This is where the difference between Proprietary and Open Source software come into play. The best thing about Open Source is the feel that it makes you feel…”Hell yea, I am contributing to a worthy cause. This, from now on is MY cause!!“

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After the post on Nagios, as a dutiful blogger, I was searching on what is new in Open-source server monitoring systems. Thats when I stumbled upon Icinga. Icinga is an enterprise grade monitoring system, which forked off from the good-’ol Nagios. It was known that they are working their brains out on developing something. Curiosity made me dig deeper.

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Knowledge is Power. Be it war, peace, administration or day-to-day business, information about any dynamic parameter you are dealing with, adds to your strength. Imagine a day when you are idly playing a video on Youtube, and out of the blue comes a popup screaming - “Dude, you’ve got a problem. MySQL is kinda acting weird, and the server load is leaping over the moon. You better check it right away!!” Aaaah!! Life would have been so much easier! If this is what you have been dreaming about, this is exactly what Nagios can deliver.

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We all know that a server’s stability is dependent on its load, directly. Load, in computing, is a measure of the amount of processing a computer is currently performing, usually as some variation on a percentage. Load spike is something from which you would always want your servers to stay away from.

This article mainly focus on finding the probable causes for a high load. I hope this article will help you in fighting those load spike nightmares.

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Monitoring and Security has always been a concern of Webhosting Industry. A web host is always in the look out of services, which will guarantee minimal downtime. Similarly, a web hosting client requires a service with which he can promise maximum uptime to his customers and gain the trust of future prospects.

Monitoring a web server essentially means alerting the server owner about the status of a service. It can be done internally where a software checks the service status and notifies the owner if some service goes down, or it can be external, where you have a web server monitoring company to the check the services status with a certain frequency.

There are many server monitoring and website monitoring tools or services available. Ideally every server you have should be monitored, every service you use, along with every domain name you own. If your server goes down for more than a certain interval of time, you should receive a message about the problem. However, if you use the aid of external monitoring companies, this can be very expensive and service fees can quickly exceed your income. You may have to end up monitoring only the most important servers or the websites of most important clients.

In addition, you will have to answer some of the major queries that arise in the mind of customers:

a) How effectively are my servers monitored ?
b) How will I monitor my servers without any external help ?
c) Am I alerted if something goes wrong in my servers

and the list goes on ….
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Ever found it frustrating that your monitoring system alerts you in the middle of the night with a false service down alert? Ever found it difficult to trust the monitoring system alerts because of the network issues in your NOC? The solution to you, is distributed monitoring. The main aim of distributed monitoring is to produce the exact result of server service checks with the help of distributed, central monitoring servers and to avoid incorrect information.

Some times due to the network problems at NOC, services will show as down, though they are not. In the distributed Monitoring system, we setup the nagios in central, distributed monitoring servers with proper modification in the configuration files. The central server sends the notification mails and others will not. So we get the exact result instead of incorrect one. The results will be more accurate if these machines (monitoring machines in the distributed setup) are located at different locations.

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