Windows Server Monitoring Best Practices

Best Practices for Web Server Monitoring: Top 4 Performance Metrics for Windows Servers © 2013, SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Why Monitor Windows® Servers? Windows server monitoring is essential because it ensures maximum end-user productivity by keeping Windows servers up and running at all times. Monitoring helps you identify issues with the operating system or applications running on the servers. If there’s an underlying problem with the hardware, the application may not function correctly. An unforeseen hardware failure (hard drive, fan) can take down your application without warning. A server monitoring tool will keep an eye on the hardware of your Windows servers. Some of the challenges you may face if you do not use a server monitoring tool include: 

Unknown server availability

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Limited access to resources

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Inadequate visibility into server performance metrics and statistics

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Inability to monitor virtual machines running within the server

Top 4 Performance Metrics to Monitor on Your Windows Servers Regardless of the server’s role, there are basic performance metrics that you should monitor. Look at the following performance metrics in your Windows server to identify what issues might be occurring.

CPU Utilization When experiencing an application or server performance issue in your environment, the metric you would consider first is the affected server’s CPU utilization. This metric provides insights into how large a load is being placed on the servers’ processor at any given time. A high sustained CPU utilization may be indicative of underperforming hardware that needs to be replaced or upgraded. If the server is virtual, it may suggest that the virtual machine suffers from insufficient resource allocation. If the machine provides multiple services and functions, you may also want to consider distributing those roles among other servers in your environment to distribute the load more evenly.

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Distribute the server load evenly among other servers in your environment

Physical Memory Consumption Another likely culprit of poorly performing applications and sluggish servers is the machine’s physical memory consumption. RAM is where the operating system stores information it uses to service applications that are actively running on the host. When a server has an inadequate amount of memory to run both the operating system and applications, the OS begins to temporarily move infrequently used blocks of memory to virtual memory located on disk. This is commonly referred to as “paging.” As demand for memory resources increase, the more paging occurs. Because the disks are significantly slower than RAM, paging creates a bottleneck on the server that can significantly impact overall server performance. If this condition occurs for a prolonged period of time, you should consider adding additional RAM to the physical or virtual server.

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Paging causes server bottlenecks, which causes performance issues in your Windows server

Virtual Memory As virtual memory consumption increases, hundreds of megabytes of information are constantly moving from RAM to disk and back to RAM again. This puts a tremendous strain on the physical disks where the swap file is located. It’s always best to ensure your operating system’s swap file is located on a different drive than the operating system itself. This prevents swap file fragmentation and ensures that paging doesn’t impact other disks or I/O-intensive operations such as databases.

Ensure your OS swap file is located on a different drive that the OS

Disk Performance Disk performance is the leading cause of server and application performance issues. Big data and virtualization have compounded this problem by placing ever-increasing strains on servers’ disk I/O subsystems. It’s important to watch your server’s queued I/O and disk latency to understand how storage performance is impacting your applications. When disk latency exceeds 100ms for any period of time, this is likely indicative of a storage performance issue. The same can be said about sustained high disk queue length.

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If your server is suffering from poor storage I/O performance, consider changing your RAID type, adding more physical disks to your array, upgrading your storage controller to one with a larger cache, or replacing older, slower disks with solid state or 15K SAS drives. Alternatively, you may be able to more evenly distribute your application’s disk I/O load by moving databases, applications, and temp files across multiple disks.

SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is an agentless server and application monitoring tool. SAM monitors over 150 applications in a given IT environment. With SAM, you can discover applications and gain visibility into the performance of your servers. 

Gain visibility into the Microsoft® Windows® server performance metrics and statistics o

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Remotely monitor WMI performance counters with SAM o

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Leverage out-of-the-box monitors to view and manage various components of your servers and applications

Monitor performance counters such as disk queue length, Windows page writes, and more

Keep an eye out for specific Windows server events o

Monitor Windows event log components to scan for recent events

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Visualize key process statistics for your entire server farm using SAM’s real-time process explorer

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Ensure ample availability of your servers using SAM’s real-time performance monitoring dashboards

Availability & Performance Monitoring of Windows Servers To gain deeper insight into the performance statistics of your Windows server, choose the server node where your Windows server is installed. Then drill down to the Application Details page that displays key performance statistics and metrics of the Windows server. SAM displays all performance metrics in the form of interactive charts and graphs. You can see the availability status of each component within the server. You can further explore and retrieve the actual metrics and monitoring results.

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Application Details page showing the server performance counters If you want to view the monitoring statistics of various component monitors within the Windows servers, you can select a specific component monitor and drill down further to see the Component Details page. You monitor every metric in the component. For example, you can obtain statistics for critical metrics such as CPU load, physical memory, and virtual memory.

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Monitor top performance metrics in your Windows servers to ensure high performance

Templates for Monitoring Your Windows Servers SAM comes with default templates that you can choose from to monitor your servers and applications. A template consists of a set of pre-defined component monitors for monitoring applications that are specific to your environment. Using these templates, SAM is able to monitor over 150 out-of-the-box applications. You can also modify existing templates or create a new one along with its components then assign the template to a node and start monitoring the application.

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Monitor applications using our expert range of templates

Templates on thwack® In addition to having access to templates on SAM, you can find various templates on thwack® for monitoring several out-of-the-box applications. Here, you have access to customized templates created by users to help other users and admins.

Other Functionalities of Server & Application Monitor SAM and Hyper-V 2012 Because Windows Server 2012 offers Hyper-V®, SAM has the ability to monitor Microsoft Hyper-V servers and its guests. SAM uses WMI to monitor Hyper-V servers. With Hyper-V being native to SAM, you can drill down to the Node Details page to view critical information about your virtual machines, hosts, and nodes.

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Monitor VM performance, hardware health, and availability of servers and its guests

Create and Manage Groups SAM integrates with other network management solutions from SolarWinds. You can manage your network more efficiently by organizing objects such as nodes, volumes, network devices, and virtual machines into groups. This enables you to learn more about performance issues within your environment.

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Add any object from your environment and create custom groups Grouping also allows you to look at specific problematic components and objects within a group. You can even see alerts for specific groups that contain a range of hardware such as servers, virtual machines, networks, switches, and routers. If you have a Microsoft environment, you might want to monitor only Microsoft applications running in your Windows servers. In this case, you can choose the applications you need to manage, group them together, and start monitoring Active Directory®, Exchange Server, IIS Server, WSUS, VMS & VDI, and other servers and desktops.

Service Control Manager The Service Control Manager is very similar to the Real-time Process Explorer. You can manage the services of the monitored Windows nodes. The Service Control Manager provides information about services currently running that aren’t on the monitored node. You can start and stop services that are assigned to applications as needed.

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Remotely start, stop, and restart critical services in your Windows server

5 Reasons to Download Server & Application Monitor 

Gain visibility into Microsoft Windows server performance metrics and statistics

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Remotely monitor WMI performance counters with SAM

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Keep a close watch on specific Windows server events

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Enjoy a Web-based and agentless monitoring platform

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Deploy and start monitoring in less than an hour

SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide - from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. The company works to put its users first and remove the obstacles that have become “status quo” in traditional enterprise software. SolarWinds products are downloadable, easy to use and maintain, and provide the power, scale, and flexibility needed to address users’ management priorities. SolarWinds’ online user community, http://thwack.com, is where tens of thousands of IT pros solve problems, share technology, and participate in product development for all of the company’s products. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com. For additional information, please contact SolarWinds at 866.530.8100 or e-mail [email protected]. To locate an international reseller near you, visit http://www.solarwinds.com/partners/reseller_locator.aspx

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