A Simple Server Monitoring Tool to Monitor Your Servers and Applications

If you are in need of monitoring the availability your servers that are spread in various geographical locations or just monitor your application’s response time, Simple Server Monitor is the tool that can suffice all of your requirements. The tool runs on your desktop and lets you monitor the availability of your servers by checking the functionality and operation [availability of service] of the default and custom ports. It not only monitors what you ask it to but also alerts when a monitor fails. The tool can alert you in a variety of ways such as Email based alerting, Pop-up on your desktop, Play sounds and also launch external applications to perform post failure tasks such as executing a batch file which can automatically login to a server and restart a service to recover from failure. The console also shows neat charts that relates to the monitors currently being used.

The most widely monitored ports that reveals the overall availability and performance of a server are as follows:

HTTP [Port 80] - This tells if your site is available and responds to a request from a browser. The tool can simulate a browser request by requesting your site’s main URL and check the response code. Tool can also monitor HTTPS port.
FTP [Port 21] - Used to upload and download files using an FTP client. If your site uses FTP for any task, you can monitor it using this tool.
SMTP [Port 25] - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is used to send and receive emails from and to your domain based email accounts. Failing which, you may no longer be able to send and receive emails. Simple Server Monitor can check the functionality of SMTP port by even logging in using the login credentials supplied. Remember, an email not delivered could be a big opportunity lost in no time for your business!
POP3 [Port 110] - Used to connect to your mailbox and download emails. Simple Server Monitor tool can simulate a user login using the supplied credentials and check if POP3 port is functional. This is a great help for organizations that receive emails from clients on their support email IDs.
PING - Using a simple PING one can always check if the destination server is up or not. Simple Server Monitor lets you create PING monitors that can ping your servers at specific intervals and update you on the response time, availability and performance.

Positives of Simple Server Monitor Tool

I have tested the 2.0 Beta release and following are the positives about this tool:

• Monitoring of the default ports - HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, POP3, SMTP and IMAP.
• Option to create monitors to monitor custom ports. Helpful if your applications uses a non standard port.
• Can run as a windows service and does not require user to login.
• Ability to setup PING based monitors and also select desired ping intervals.
• Nice and easy alert mechanism.
• Ability to send email notification to multiple recipients.
• Monitor as many as servers you want to.
• Logging of events in csv file format is possible.
• Skins - The default installation has 6 skins.
• Low pricing for the number of features it has.

Negatives of Simple Server Monitor Tool

Since this is a beta release, I guess these would be taken care of in the final release. Here is what I have found so far:

• The tool may sometimes crash when you create a new configuration.
• The display could become little messy when monitoring more than 15 different servers.
• Lack of a basic reporting system to see a trend of failures which us most often required for business reporting and decision making.
• No option to export the monitoring data selectively in CSV and other file formats for various external purposes.

Overall Review: Simple Server Monitor is a simple yet great tool and has a potential to suffice all of your server monitoring requirements. It can be used by individuals, help desk agents, IT support staff and small-medium size organizations for day-to-day monitoring activities. It’s very low on budget, works very well and can be pro-actively used to prevent extended downtime of your infrastructure.

You can download your trial copy of Simple Server Monitor and give it a try and if you intend to purchase this product, use the coupon code V20BETA, valid until 3/31/07 to avail 20% discount on the listed price.

Disclaimer: This is a paid review that does not require me to provide a positive feedback and does not contain affiliate links. The review has not been edited by the product owner and is written based out of my own trial experience with this product. If you wish to order a review, you may do so here.