Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Internet server monitoring and what it does to ISP Industry

By Nemanja Djuric


Internet server monitoring is much wider than website monitoring. Monitoring a web server means that the server owner always knows if one or all of his services go down. Web server monitoring may be internal, i.e. web server software checks its status and notifies the owner if some services go down, and external, i.e. some web server monitoring companies check the services status with a certain frequency. External monitoring is much more reliable, as it keeps on working when the server completely goes down.

Typically, most website monitoring services test a server anywhere between once-per hour to once-per-minute. When monitoring a web server for potential problems, an external web monitoring service checks a number of parameters. Web server monitoring service can check HTTPP pages, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, SSH, Telnet, SSL, TCP, PING and a range of other protocols with great variety of check intervals from every 4 hours to every one minute.

Analysis of the HTTP codes is the fastest way to determine the current status of the monitored web server. Common Web Server Monitoring Services: Google Webmasters/Analytics, Binary Canary, Web Service Guard, ObservePoint, Dotcom-Monitor,Montastic, WatchMouse. As the information brought by web server monitoring services is in most cases urgent and may be of crucial importance, various notification methods may be used: e-mail, land-line and cell phones, SMS, fax, pagers, etc. First of all, it monitors for a proper HTTP return code. By HTTP specifications RFC 2616, any web server returns several HTTP codes.

Some tools measure traffic by sniffing and others use SNMP, WMI or other local agents to measure bandwidth use on individual machines and routers. In computer networks, network traffic measurement is the process of measuring the amount and type of traffic on a particular network. This is especially important with regard to effective bandwidth management. Various software tools are available to measure network traffic.

These would generally 'sit' between the LAN and the LAN's exit point, generally the WAN or Internet router, and all packets leaving and entering the network would go through them. In most cases the appliance would operate as a bridge on the network so that it is undetectable by users. However, the latter generally do not detect the type of traffic, nor do they work for machines which are not running the necessary agent software, such as rogue machines on the network, or machines for which no compatible agent is available. In the latter case, inline appliances are preferred.




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