What "health parameters" do you guys monitor on a web (or sql) server (Windows 2008)?
RAM, CPU, Disk space, event log, specific web pages, network..more?
Do you have alarms that goes of on all of these if something critical is reached, i.e. ram usage over X % or something like that?
I (or more accurate the sysadmins) have access to WhatsUp Gold as a monitoring tool. But right now there are hardly any alarms set up I think.
Best Answer
It depends what the server is doing really. For example, I know my Exchange 2007 servers will use a lot of memory, that’s what Exchange does, it grabs as much as it can, so monitoring this server for High Ram use would keep me awake all night, however I want to know if my disk space is getting low on here, as Exchange is prone to stop working with low disk space. On the other hand, I'm not really that concerned about the disk usage on my print server.
Really you need to look at your servers and determine what you need to know about them, what’s important to them running correctly, what’s nice to know for historical or tracking purposes, and what is superfluous. When you've determined what’s critical, then you really should have alarms or triggers setup for these events, what’s the point in monitoring something if you don't know when it goes wrong?