4 Tools To Monitor Your Server

Monitoring the health of servers manually can save you from memory leaks, bad resource-consuming software, attacks and downtime.

TL;DR glances, htop, iotop and iftop

The 4 Tools in iTerm

Installation commands in this tutorial assume Debian/Ubuntu distro and root access, else use sudo

#1 Glances

Glances v2.8 in Ubuntu 16.04

glances is, in my opinion, the best summary of the current state of your server. CPU Stats, Memory Stats, Network Stats, Disk Stats and list of top processes (sortable too) and much more!. Additionally, it has configurable warnings for the tracked stats.

You can easily install it with its auto-install script with curl or wget:

curl -L http://bit.ly/glances | /bin/bash

or

wget -O- http://bit.ly/glances | /bin/bash

If you have Pip:

pip install glances

#2 htop

htop 2.0 in Ubuntu 16.04

I’m sure you all know top. Well, htop is top on steroids. It adds colors, bar graphs, sorting, filtering, tree visualization, customization and much more.

To install it, just run:

apt-get install htop

#3 iotop

iotop v0.6 in Ubuntu 16.04

iotop monitors your disk I/O. It’s perfect to find out which processes are consuming your disk I/O and come to a solution.

Many distros come with iotop installed, but if not just use the following command:

apt-get install iotop

#4 iftop

Slow upload/download speed to/from your server? Use iftop and check who is consuming your link! You can see the cumulative transferred bytes and peak up/down speeds on the bottom-left. You can also see the current down/up rates for the last 2, 10 and 40 seconds intervals in the bottom-right.

I suggest using the logarithmic option. Just type L in uppercase.

Install iftop using the following command:

apt-get install iftop

Love any tool? Comment below!

I’m sure there are many more I don’t know

Need to contact me? Check https://diegorbaquero.com

Thank you for reading