Server monitoring is the continuous process of watching your server or application state, collecting metrics, and alerting. It's mandatory for any serious server — without it, clients discover problems first, get angry, and you find out late.
Key monitoring metrics
Server-level: CPU load, RAM usage, Disk I/O and space, Network bandwidth, Load Average, Uptime. Application-level: HTTP response time, Error rate (4xx, 5xx), Request count, Database query duration. Business-level: Active users, Orders per minute, Revenue, Conversion rate.
Top monitoring tools
Prometheus + Grafana — open source. Prometheus scrapes metrics (pull model), Grafana visualizes. Standard for Kubernetes and modern stacks. Self-hosted, free. Complex setup but flexible.
Datadog — the most popular commercial SaaS. APM (Application Performance Monitoring), logs, traces, metrics — all in one. $15-31/host/month. Rich ecosystem, easy setup.
New Relic — APM leader. Free tier 100 GB logs/month. Real-time application insights.
Zabbix — open source, a server-monitoring veteran (since 2001). Plain interface but powerful.
Nagios — old and battle-tested. Complex configuration, popular in enterprise.
Better Stack (formerly Logtail) — modern, easy setup. Logs + uptime + status pages.
Alerting strategy
Create alert rules: CPU 80%+ for 5 minutes, disk 90%+, error rate 5%+. Alert channels: PagerDuty (on-call rotation), Opsgenie, Slack, Telegram, email, SMS.
Alert fatigue — too many alerts and the team starts ignoring them. Fix: prioritize alerts (P1 critical, P2 high, P3 medium).
Sayt.uz practice
Sayt.uz infrastructure runs a Prometheus + Grafana + AlertManager stack. We also offer basic monitoring (uptime, response time) free for client sites. For VPS Pro clients we help set up Datadog or New Relic. Tip: for an ordinary business site, UptimeRobot free is enough. For a real-time business-critical app, Datadog or a Prometheus stack.