Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog about The Server Monitor from Otto Papp of Blue Panther. The Server Monitor is a featured service in the SoftLayer Tech Partner Marketplace that makes it easy for customers to get a deep view of what is happening on their servers. To learn more about The Server Monitor, visit http://theservermonitor.com/.

Know What’s Happening on Your Servers

The Server Monitor was born when we noticed a need in our company. We have been developing and maintaining online businesses for more than 6 years now, and in that time we encountered all kinds of problems. We know very well that any interruption of a service can have many negative effects, so to track and prevent service interruptions we needed a monitoring tool. We tried both commercial and open-source software, but none of them was suited for the job, so we set out to create a product that met six key requirements:

1. Simple Setup, Simple Configuration and Simple Maintenance
While we were searching for a monitoring tool, we many solutions. Most of them were really painful to install and even worse to configure. If you have a service that needs to be scaled and you need to upgrade servers or change your infrastructure, you don’t want to waste your time repeating a painful job over and over again. The same thing holds true if you simply have to manage more than a few servers.

In response to this need, The Server Monitor’s agent was built to be installed and configured under two minutes on every server. Unlike with some of the other tools out there, you don’t have to be an expert in administration and configuration thanks to the meticulous design of the application and its user interface. Even when this tool evolves and improves, it is easily upgraded via a powerful (and simple) built-in upgrade mechanism.

The tool helps you avoid using your server to store monitoring data and frees you from having to install and maintaining a dedicated monitoring data database. Using an agent also helps The Server Monitor consume less of your server’s computing power in the monitoring process.

2. Ease of Use
We wanted a tool that could be easily understood by our clients, so we built the user experience with very clear visuals like our customizable graphical reports. These reports can help non-technical people understand what’s happening on a given server, and they help seasoned systems administrators track down the root cause of any server problems to any component of their system as well. Unfortunately, some of the best solutions on the market were hard to understand and analyze, even for us, as a technical team. That’s why we focused a lot on clearly presenting only relevant data.

3. Accurate and Advanced Monitoring
Another big issue we ran into was the accuracy of the monitored data. Some solutions offered a 5, 10 or 30 minute reading which is not very helpful when you’re debugging a problem or detecting an outage. Others had second- or minute-based monitoring frequency but delivered inaccurate results.

We built The Server Monitor to provide a high level of accuracy by computing the average variation of the monitored data over one minute. We are developing dedicated monitors to all the major services usually used on servers, and by truly understanding these services, we can customize the readings to offer the best view of what’s happening with each service.

4. Early Warning for Potential Disasters
The most valuable aspect of good server monitoring tools is their ability to notified users of major events. If your monitoring tools are local on the server, if the server goes down, the monitoring system does too, so you didn’t get notified. On the other side, we noticed that the online solutions couldn’t provide very much in the way of detailed information.

This is one of the reasons why we opted for an agent-based solution which notifies you when things start to go wrong so you can take immediate action. The Server Monitor includes a powerful alert system with an unlimited number of configurable alerts that can be sent out in real time via SMS, Twitter or email.

5. A Centralized View
In order to speed up our customers’ routine administration checks, we built a unified interface where all the servers monitored can be seen quickly. That centralize view continues to evolve as we get feedback from customers, and we’ll keep tweaking it to make sure we convey the most relevant data on each server as simply as possible. With that goal in mind, we’ve also built a report-sharing system, that allows customers to check these reports in their own interfaces.

6. Flexibility for Developers
While The Server Monitor is an online service, we also develop highly sophisticated software engines (in our spare time). These programs are very different, so each would need a unique kind of monitoring tool, but creating specialized tools with limited scopes would be time consuming and inefficient. We couldn’t find any existing solution to solve this problem so we came up with our own! The idea is simple, your software collects and computes its specific metrics and gives them to the agent program which sends them to the central system. From there, you can then analyze, compare and follow their information.

Initially, our goal was to build a monitoring platform that worked for us, and in the process, we built a product that could be extremely useful to other developers in our position, so we began offering the service externally. We have a free version of the software that you’re welcome to try on your own servers, and if you want to take advantage of some of the additional features and functionality of the system, we have a 30 day trial to see if it fits your requirements.

-Otto Papp, The Server Monitor