Statistics indicate that websites that go down for even an hour result in significant losses, both financially and in terms of customer trust. In a digital world that relies on speed and continuity, website performance and rapid response become one of the most important factors that differentiate a successful project from one that fails.

This is where continuous server monitoring comes in. This process is not just a technical routine; it's an essential safeguard to ensure system stability and protect your business from sudden outages, slow user experience, and even cyber attacks.

In this article, we'll help you protect your business from downtime and ensure continuity by learning how to continuously monitor server performance.

The Importance of Server Performance Monitoring
The importance of server monitoring isn't just technical; it's a strategic element in the customer experience, enhancing brand reputation, and achieving success and sustainable growth. This is due to the following reasons:

Customers don't wait: If your website page loads in more than 3 seconds, visitors will leave. This is evidence of slow website performance, which can lead to the loss of potential customers.

Enhancing security: Some cyber attacks test server stability first. If real-time monitoring isn't available to detect these attempts, you won't be able to detect a cyber attack on your site until it's too late. This could result in the theft of sensitive data or a complete site downtime.

Decision-making: Continuous server monitoring provides you with accurate data on resource usage, network loads, and user behavior. This helps you make strategic decisions that support system stability and enhance site performance. You can also decide to upgrade your server in case of increased load.
Enhancing your brand's reputation: Unstable website performance or slow loading times can cause customers to leave and may never return. Therefore, regular server monitoring ensures system stability and strengthens your brand among your competitors.
Impact on profits: In the world of e-commerce, any downtime results in significant revenue loss, so continuous monitoring is an investment that ensures increased sales.
Methods for monitoring server performance continuously
There are many reliable methods and tools for monitoring servers, each of which depends on monitoring a specific part or indicator of the server. This is to ensure system stability and enhance performance.

First: The basic components within the server
The basic components are the first to be constantly monitored to ensure they are fully and effectively functioning and to resolve any problems that arise. These components are as follows:

Central Processing Unit (CPU): This is the primary indicator of system performance. It must be continuously monitored to ensure that its utilization rate or indicator does not exceed the maximum limit. When the utilization rate reaches the maximum limit, this indicates a risk of system congestion, which affects website performance and slows down various operations. This may be due to the presence of processes or applications that consume server resources at a higher than normal rate.
Random Access Memory (RAM) Usage: Every application used and every operation performed on the website consumes RAM. When RAM becomes full, it causes poor server performance and difficulty processing tasks, negatively impacting system stability and website performance.
Disk Usage: This is the server's storage space, responsible for managing temporary files, backups, and system updates. Overfilling the server can lead to the failure of many important operations and database downtime.
Network Traffic: By continuously monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic, you can track the number of visits and ensure the server's capacity during peak times. This can also detect any abnormal activity immediately, or any DDOS attacks that disrupt traffic and impact site performance and system stability.
Response Time: This measures the server's response time to a user request. The shorter the response time, the better the site's performance.
Error Tracking: Continuously monitoring the server helps identify recurring errors, thus tracking and quickly resolving them before they escalate and impact performance.
Second: Server Monitoring Tools and Techniques
There are many tools that help monitor the server continuously and effectively. These tools vary from free to paid, and some are open source or closed. These tools include:

Built-in tools
Command-line tools: These provide a quick overview of the site's performance and server resources, including isotat, vmstat, htop, and top. In addition, tools like Resource Monitor and Task Manager, built into Windows, track system performance.
These tools are free, but they do not provide automatic alerts or continuous server monitoring data.

Server monitoring tools
zabbix: This is a powerful, free, and open-source tool. It can monitor servers, networks, applications in use, and virtual machines. It can also set up custom alerts via email or SMS.
Prometheus: This is another open-source tool that can handle and collect massive amounts of data and alert you when problems occur.
Nagios: This is one of the oldest and most popular server monitoring tools. It monitors devices and services very effectively, helping resolve problems as soon as they arise, before they affect system stability. Datadog: It is a paid tool that provides comprehensive solutions for monitoring servers, infrastructure, and applications.