Uptime Monitor and Downtime Tracker Tool to Check Server Uptime

An uptime monitor helps ensure your server and applications are running at their maximum potential

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Optimize Health

Remotely Kill Processes

Monitor Multiple Vendors

Availability Monitoring

Simplify Compliance

Optimize system health with server uptime monitoring

Hardware resource bottlenecks not only affect application and server uptime, but they can be a symptom of overall poor server performance. SolarWinds^® Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is built to monitor your most important hardware resources to help you see where resources may be spread too thin and where you run the risk of downtime.

SAM is also designed to monitor the key metrics you need to better understand overall server health. For example:

Measuring CPU load can provide insight into whether server hardware needs to be upgraded.
Poor disk performance can indicate a storage performance issue.
Physical and virtual memory usage may show where there’s a strain on the system, which can lead to issues.

With insight into these metrics and more, it’s possible to both optimize server health and plan to ensure continued service uptime.

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Remotely kill processes hogging server resources

Rogue processes and even stopped services can continue to consume server hardware resources, which can negatively affect server and application performance. The server uptime monitoring software in SAM is built with a Real-Time Process Explorer, which can allow you to remotely log in to a server and kill processes hogging server resources.

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Monitor multi-vendor server hardware health

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Hardware health is an important part of maintaining high uptime and availability in your system. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor can help you start monitoring your multi-vendor server hardware health to help you make sure hardware isn’t causing downtime.

Proactive server health monitoring for key indicators can allow you to fix problems before they become severe. With SAM, you can view key hardware health metrics, such as fan speed, power supply, and server temperature, to better gauge the health of your hardware and ensure any performance issues you may be facing aren’t the result of old devices.

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Get real-time visibility with server availability monitoring

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Monitor application performance and hardware health, along with your routine scheduled tasks, and get real-time visibility into task completion, all from a single uptime tracker dashboard. With the server uptime monitoring tools in SAM, you can also easily restart or stop services to resume website or web app availability.

Access over 200 out-of-the-box apps and manage all your critical business applications using SolarWinds SAM, including tracking uptime and downtime for:

Email servers
Authentication servers
Java application servers
Virtual infrastructure
Operating systems like Windows, Linux, and UNIX
Databases like SQL, Oracle, SAP ASE, DB2, MySQL
Web servers like IIS and Apache

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Turn Compliance Into a Routine, Not a Crisis

Let’s face it: you don’t have time for a monitoring tool that takes days to set up or requires expert knowledge to interpret its dashboard. We understand your work is already complex, so there’s no need for your tools to add extra complications. That’s why our server uptime monitoring in SAM features an intuitive interface and easily customizable dashboards. This enables you and your team to act on information quickly and resolve issues without getting lost in setup. Plus, when a compliance auditor visits or your CIO requests proof of five-nines uptime, you need trustworthy data.

SAM provides the reporting you need for industry standards and builds confidence through a dependable audit trail. It’s not about avoiding downtime—it’s about simplifying your job and providing the evidence you need to validate your efforts.

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Fully functional for 30 days

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Get More on Uptime Monitor

Do you find yourself asking…

What is server uptime?
How can server uptime be checked?
How does server uptime monitoring work?
Why is uptime monitoring important?
What does server uptime monitoring software do?
How does uptime monitor work in SAM?

Server uptime is a measure of the time a server remains operational, accessible, and capable of processing requests. It is typically expressed as a percentage of total time within a given period, such as a month or a year. Achieving five-nines uptime (99.999%) is a common industry gold standard, representing less than six minutes of downtime per year.

Monitoring this metric is essential because it directly impacts business continuity and user experience. SAM tracks uptime through intuitive interfaces capable of visualizing performance and identifying issues before they cause outages.

Why uptime matters:

Compliance: Many industries require proof of consistent uptime to meet regulatory standards
Accountability: Dependable audit trails provide evidence of system reliability to CIOs and stakeholders
Efficiency: Automated monitoring prevents teams from getting lost in manual setup, allowing them to resolve issues more quickly

Maintaining high uptime is about more than avoiding technical failure; it’s about simplifying operations and providing the data needed to verify compliance.

Checking server uptime is important for determining whether devices are performing as they should. In a large network, this information is also a critical part of monitoring server functionality and understanding how it affects the availability of the services you use.

While you can check server uptime manually, the more devices and nodes you have in your environment, the more difficult this process becomes. However, the basics of manually checking server uptime are similar across operating systems.

In Microsoft Windows, you can check server uptime using either the “net statistics server” command or the “systeminfo” command. To use either of these commands, follow these steps:

On the command line, connect to your cloud server, which you can do through Remote Desktop Protocol
Type either “net statistics server” or “systeminfo,” and then press Enter
Find the line beginning with “Statistics since,” which will indicate when the uptime started

Another way to check server uptime in Windows is through Task Manager:

Open Task Manager by right-clicking the taskbar
Click on the Performance tab at the top, and ensure SPU is selected on the left side
Toward the bottom of the window, you will see the uptime listed

In Linux, you can check server uptime by following these steps:

Select Applications, then Accessories, then Terminal to open a command-line terminal
Type the command “$ uptime”
The output displays the current time, how long the system has been running, the number of logged-in users, and the system load averages over the last 5, 10, and 15 minutes

While it’s possible to check each server’s uptime individually, manual server uptime monitoring can be a tedious process, wasting both time and energy while producing few applicable results. The breadth of information you can discover about your network through manual uptime monitoring is far more limited than what a comprehensive monitoring solution can provide.

Investing in server uptime monitoring software can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts. With SAM, you can monitor server uptime across your entire environment using integrated templates designed to track thousands of applications, operating systems, and devices, helping ensure your systems and services are performing optimally.

Server uptime monitoring consists of monitoring and measuring statistics and data across your environment, including hardware resources, system health, services, and processes. One of the central components of server uptime monitoring is tracking server hardware health and resources, as hardware bottlenecks can affect server and application uptime and performance.

The main metrics to watch when monitoring hardware health include:

CPU load: High CPU utilization can indicate the server hardware isn’t performing optimally and needs to be upgraded or replaced
Virtual memory: Increases in virtual memory consumption place physical disks in your system under intense pressure as data is constantly moving between RAM, those disks, and back to RAM, which can potentially lead to disk fragmentation
Physical memory usage: Physical memory bottlenecks can be caused by paging, a method of controlling how memory resources are shared on a virtual or physical server
Disk performance: Disk latency, often due to an issue with storage performance, can also cause bottlenecks
Hardware health: The health of your hardware is central to the performance of your server, and monitoring key metrics such as power supply, fan speed, and server temperature can help you stay on top of hardware health and fix problems before they become critical, thus preventing system downtime—it’s all about proactive performance monitoring

We often use synthetic checks such as a simple TCP handshake or a full web request to measure server response time and confirm website availability from different locations.

Ideally, a server uptime tool can let you monitor application health alongside hardware health from a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. This information can then be used to gain insights into the performance of different aspects of system health, helping you better understand the overall availability of your servers. At SolarWinds, we believe in deep observability, which means giving you not only the “what” but the “why” behind any performance issue.

Server uptime is a measure of the time a server remains operational, accessible, and capable of processing requests. It is typically expressed as a percentage of total time within a given period, such as a month or a year. Achieving five-nines uptime (99.999%) is a common industry gold standard, representing less than six minutes of downtime per year.
Monitoring this metric is essential because it directly impacts business continuity and user experience. SAM tracks uptime through intuitive interfaces capable of visualizing performance and identifying issues before they cause outages.
Why uptime matters:
Compliance: Many industries require proof of consistent uptime to meet regulatory standards
Accountability: Dependable audit trails provide evidence of system reliability to CIOs and stakeholders
Efficiency: Automated monitoring prevents teams from getting lost in manual setup, allowing them to resolve issues more quickly
Maintaining high uptime is about more than avoiding technical failure; it’s about simplifying operations and providing the data needed to verify compliance.
Checking server uptime is important for determining whether devices are performing as they should. In a large network, this information is also a critical part of monitoring server functionality and understanding how it affects the availability of the services you use.
While you can check server uptime manually, the more devices and nodes you have in your environment, the more difficult this process becomes. However, the basics of manually checking server uptime are similar across operating systems.
In Microsoft Windows, you can check server uptime using either the “net statistics server” command or the “systeminfo” command. To use either of these commands, follow these steps:
On the command line, connect to your cloud server, which you can do through Remote Desktop Protocol
Type either “net statistics server” or “systeminfo,” and then press Enter
Find the line beginning with “Statistics since,” which will indicate when the uptime started
Another way to check server uptime in Windows is through Task Manager:
Open Task Manager by right-clicking the taskbar
Click on the Performance tab at the top, and ensure SPU is selected on the left side
Toward the bottom of the window, you will see the uptime listed
In Linux, you can check server uptime by following these steps:
Select Applications, then Accessories, then Terminal to open a command-line terminal
Type the command “$ uptime”
The output displays the current time, how long the system has been running, the number of logged-in users, and the system load averages over the last 5, 10, and 15 minutes
While it’s possible to check each server’s uptime individually, manual server uptime monitoring can be a tedious process, wasting both time and energy while producing few applicable results. The breadth of information you can discover about your network through manual uptime monitoring is far more limited than what a comprehensive monitoring solution can provide.
Investing in server uptime monitoring software can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts. With SAM, you can monitor server uptime across your entire environment using integrated templates designed to track thousands of applications, operating systems, and devices, helping ensure your systems and services are performing optimally.
Server uptime monitoring consists of monitoring and measuring statistics and data across your environment, including hardware resources, system health, services, and processes. One of the central components of server uptime monitoring is tracking server hardware health and resources, as hardware bottlenecks can affect server and application uptime and performance.

The main metrics to watch when monitoring hardware health include:

CPU load: High CPU utilization can indicate the server hardware isn’t performing optimally and needs to be upgraded or replaced

Virtual memory: Increases in virtual memory consumption place physical disks in your system under intense pressure as data is constantly moving between RAM, those disks, and back to RAM, which can potentially lead to disk fragmentation

Physical memory usage: Physical memory bottlenecks can be caused by paging, a method of controlling how memory resources are shared on a virtual or physical server

Disk performance: Disk latency, often due to an issue with storage performance, can also cause bottlenecks

Hardware health: The health of your hardware is central to the performance of your server, and monitoring key metrics such as power supply, fan speed, and server temperature can help you stay on top of hardware health and fix problems before they become critical, thus preventing system downtime—it’s all about proactive performance monitoring

We often use synthetic checks such as a simple TCP handshake or a full web request to measure server response time and confirm website availability from different locations.

Ideally, a server uptime tool can let you monitor application health alongside hardware health from a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. This information can then be used to gain insights into the performance of different aspects of system health, helping you better understand the overall availability of your servers. At SolarWinds, we believe in deep observability, which means giving you not only the “what” but the “why” behind any performance issue.
Server uptime monitoring tools are built to allow you to better protect the continued functionality of your business by helping pinpoint problems in your system, whether in the hardware, websites, or applications on your network. An uptime monitor helps you prevent downtime and find the root causes of performance failures before they cause significant damage.

Server monitoring software can also work as a downtime monitoring tool or uptime tracker by constantly checking for any issues impacting performance. This can help you bring your downtime as close to 0% as possible and maximize the availability of your system.

Depending on the server, the work done by an uptime monitor can look a little different. This includes:

Application servers are monitored for server responsiveness and availability

Storage servers are monitored for availability, data loss, delay, and capacity

Web servers are monitored for security, user load, and speed

Additionally, server uptime monitoring software can help you track the number of users simultaneously accessing your applications and servers during peak business hours. This can help you understand resource utilization and allocation and determine whether system resources are affecting application performance so you can load balance appropriately.

This is where real user monitoring comes in handy. Server uptime monitoring software can also send real-time alerts when performance issues are first detected, which can help you determine whether your services are providing the amount of uptime guaranteed by SLAs. When a check fails, you need instant notifications—not false positives. You can also create uptime checks for specific server types, such as DNS or SMTP, to cover all your bases.