Advanced Host Monitoring

A host monitor is a tool built to perform monitoring tasks, such as tracking metrics, to help ensure host systems are functioning as optimally as possible.

A host is a device that supports networked services, like applications or websites. A host can be a web server, virtual machine, desktop computer, or similar device that can be assigned an IP address. A host can include clients and servers, but not switches or router. 

The term “host” is most commonly used in virtual environments in which multiple virtual machines share resources from a shared “host,” but there are many different types. Some examples include:

• Web hosts
• Virtual hosts
• Cloud hosts
• Remote hosts

These different types of hosts vary in scope, but they all reference a sort of foundational computer system on which other servers, applications, sites, and operations depend. A host monitor is a tool that monitors host performance to help ensure critical network operations aren’t compromised. 

Just as with network monitoring, there are many different steps when approaching host performance monitoring. The first step is to discover hosts across your network you need to monitor. 

Next, using protocols like Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) pings, you can begin gaining insight into the host’s state. These tools send pings to the host or hosts and parse their responses. These pings can convey information about connection quality, latency, jitter, and uptime. 

Host monitoring solutions are designed to collect key metrics about performance, which can include application pools, cache requests, threads, memory usage, load, CPU utilization, and more. Depending on what you need to monitor, you can typically use templates focused on monitoring the appropriate metrics depending on the host type. 

Host monitoring can be made easier when you have comprehensive software built to automate host monitoring tasks, including alerts for critical metric changes.

Host monitoring is important because a host, regardless of type, can be the backbone of a network. Hosts are designed to provide many services for your network, from supporting applications and websites to file hosting. Host monitoring can allow you to track the stability and performance of your hosts, which is critical to tracking drops in host performance that could affect services across your network. 

To understand why host monitoring is critical, consider virtual machine monitoring. A virtual machine is a server hosted on hypervisor hardware and isolated from the hypervisor but still runs on the same underlying hardware. 

Since a virtual machine can be sandboxed away from the rest of the system, anything done to or on the virtual machine won’t affect the host. It’s possible for multiple virtual machines to coexist on the same host if the host has enough resources to sustain all the VMs. Ensuring optimal host health is important because if the host isn’t functioning properly or doesn’t have enough resources, the operations of all the VMs on it will be compromised.

Host monitoring is important because it can enable you to monitor and optimize hosts, which in turn can help optimize the performance of applications, servers, and virtual machines running on them. 

Host monitoring software is built to automate, optimize, and streamline the host monitoring process. While it’s possible to manually monitor host performance, it can be labor-intensive and time-consuming in addition to monitoring hosts, applications, and servers for resource usage. 

Enterprise-grade host monitoring software can help automate the process of collecting and monitoring key host performance metrics, including:

• Hardware health
• Fan status
• Temperature status
• Individual application and server performance
• Fan speed

By centralizing these metrics to provide more informative insights into how the host is faring under the strain of the network, using host monitoring software can help make sure you distribute host resources across the network as efficiently as possible. Host monitoring software can indicate when servers have reached capacity, pinpoint bottlenecks, and alert admins to laggy performance before it starts to negatively affect end-user experience.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is built to be a powerful and scalable enterprise-grade host monitor solution equipped with the features you need to optimize server environments—whether on-premises, cloud, or hybrid. 

If you’re using multiple virtual machines, it’s critical to make sure the host has enough resources available to support them. SAM includes built-in server capacity planning and resource usage tools, so you can easily keep an eye on disk, CPU, memory, and other key usage metrics. You can even set up warning alerts to notify you when servers and applications are nearing critical performance thresholds to help ensure you’ll never be caught off-guard by host performance issues again. 

SolarWinds SAM also features integrated PerfStack, AppStack, and AppInsight dashboard functionalities to help round out its capabilities as an advanced host monitor. AppStack can help you more easily pinpoint the root cause of application issues by mapping applications and their dependencies within physical and virtual server environments. PerfStack is designed to help you generate data-driven insights with cross-stack data correlation. Monitoring Active Directory, Exchange, or IIS? The AppInsight applications in SolarWinds SAM are built to provide a level of detail and expert knowledge beyond what simple templates can provide by getting relevant performance information from the server level and providing the ability to drill down into the data store layer for deeper performance data.