Server Monitoring

Server monitoring is essential for ensuring the availability, performance and security of your IT infrastructure. Icinga offers a flexible, scalable open source solution for monitoring Linux, Windows and cloud servers and is your powerful, all-embracing tool to keep your IT environment under control.

Monitor any type of server
Agent-based or agentless monitoring
Monitor many different operating systems with one tool
Monitor the hardware of physical servers
View your distributed infrastructure in one interface
Extend with your own monitoring checks and plugins

Server Connectivity Monitoring

Monitoring server connectivity is a key part of server monitoring, ensuring you are immediately aware of availability issues across your infrastructure. Icinga monitors the connectivity of your servers with default ping checks and can easily extend monitoring to SSH, TCP, UDP, RDP, or any other network-accessible service.

Learn more about Network Monitoring

Monitoring Server System Resources

Icinga monitors all critical system resources as part of comprehensive server monitoring. It accesses local resources on your servers to track key metrics and ensure everything runs smoothly. From CPU load to active processes, OS parameters and scheduled tasks. Icinga provides full visibility into the health and performance of your servers.

Services and Processes
Utilization of Disks
Server Load
Utilization of Memory (RAM)
Specific OS Parameters
Logged in Users
Logfiles and Eventlog
Cronjobs and Scheduled Tasks
Uptime
Available Updates
Health of Applications
Containers
Anything else Icinga can access

Server Monitoring for Different Operating Systems

Depending on your operating system you may choose either the Icinga Agent, or agentless monitoring via SSH.

Icinga supports server monitoring across a wide range of operating systems and platforms, including Linux distributions, Windows, cloud environments and more. You can choose between using the Icinga Agent or agentless monitoring via SSH, depending on your infrastructure and preferences. This gives you maximum flexibility to monitor servers running on Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, CentOS, Windows, AWS, and many other systems.

 

Server Resources and Metrics

Icinga’s server monitoring gives you full visibility into resource utilization and capacity. By tracking metrics such as disk space, memory usage and server load, Icinga helps you identify issues early and take action before they impact your infrastructure. Custom alerts notify you when thresholds are exceeded, so you can prevent outages and performance problems.

All metrics can be stored in a time series database (TSDB) of your choice. Visualizing historical data through graphs and charts makes it easy to spot trends and patterns over time.

Learn more on Icinga Metrics & Logs

 

Supported Server Types

Icinga makes it easy to monitor different types of servers in your heterogeneous infrastructure — all with a single, flexible server monitoring solution. 

File Servers

Monitor network file storage from enterprise vendors like NetApp, Dell or EMC2 and others. Icinga also supports monitoring of custom-built storage systems using technologies such as Ceph, GlusterFS, XFS or other technologies.

Application Servers

Your business depends on essential application servers to keep operations running smoothly at all times. Icinga monitors DNS servers, Tomcat, Apache, mail servers, IIS and any other applications running on your infrastructure. Learn more on our dedicated page for Application Monitoring

Web Servers

Web servers such as NGINX or Apache provide detailed information about their current health state and utilization. Icinga leverages this data to notify you about errors and capacity issues.

Database Servers

Whether it’s MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, MongoDB or other database systems, Icinga collects detailed information about their status and usage. Learn more about how Icinga supports database monitoring on our dedicated Database Monitoring Page.

Mail Servers

Ensure reliable communication with customers and colleagues by monitoring your mail servers. Icinga checks the functionality of SMTP, IMAP, POP3 and Microsoft Exchange to help prevent email disruptions.

Proxy Servers

Proxy servers act as gateways to the internet or specific parts of your network. As a central part of your infrastructure, any downtime can significantly impact your business. Icinga monitors different types of proxy servers, such as Squid, and alerts you if issues arise.

Hardware Monitoring

Running and maintaining physical servers requires special attention to the hardware itself. Most server vendors provide dedicated management interfaces to monitor temperature, fans, network interfaces and other hardware-specific parameters.

Open standards like IPMI and Redfish are commonly used to access hardware data over the network. Icinga monitors this hardware remotely and notifies you when thresholds are exceeded.

 

Environmental Monitoring

While you monitor what happens within your servers and systems, it is also essential to observe the environment where your hardware is located. Icinga monitors the temperature, humidity, power and many more environmental metrics with the support of external hardware sensors.

Monitoring any Hardware Sensor

By monitoring the temperature of your whole datacenter and each single rack, you gain insight about the changes before the systems overheat. Humidity plays an important role as well, maintaining an optimal level can prevent costly repairs.

Smoke detectors spot potential fires in their area. If thresholds are exceeded, Icinga alerts you immediately so you can take action.

Door contact sensors can help enforce security policies, for example: Icinga can alert you if a door is opened outside business hours.

Icinga monitors sensor data via SNMP or by accessing APIs. This means you can monitor virtually any type of sensor that exposes its data.

Get Started with Icinga

Get going with your full-stack enterprise-ready server monitoring solution. Follow the installation course for a seamless setup with Icinga.

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