Servers are the foundation of the modern digital business, running critical applications, websites, databases and more. When these crucial engines grind to a halt due to misconfigurations, hardware failures or human errors, major disruptions ensue impacting productivity and revenue.
According to various surveys, the average cost of infrastructure downtime is over $300,000 per hour across industries like financial services, e-commerce and healthcare. Outages are often complicated, resulting from subtle issues across interconnected systems versus one smoking gun.
This is why having robust server configuration monitoring and auditing practices in place is essential. In this comprehensive guide, we will cover:
- Key capabilities effective server monitoring provides
- Leading tools to manage server fleets at scale
- Best practices for setup, operations and security integration
- Regulatory compliance considerations
- How to choose the ideal solution for your needs
Let‘s get started!
Why Server Monitoring and Auditing Matters
Server monitoring refers to continuously tracking server hardware, operating systems, installed software, services, processes, performance metrics and changes.
Out-of-the-box it provides crucial visibility into:
- Resource utilization – CPU, memory, disk, network I/O
- Performance issues – application bottlenecks, slow queries etc.
- Availability of critical services and sites
- Errors and failures recorded across log data
Armed with monitoring telemetry, IT teams can optimize capacity planning, troubleshoot faster and avoid outages through early warning.
Auditing covers capturing detailed history of changes made to server configurations, permissions, software versions and more. This helps answer critical questions like:
- Who made what change and when?
- Why were unauthorized modifications done?
- Is operational drift occurring around security policies?
Auditing gives unique forensic evidence for investigation and aids regulatory compliance.
Together, monitoring and auditing provide well-rounded visibility for taming server sprawl at scale. They form the foundation of resilient, efficient IT operations.
Top Server Monitoring and Auditing Tools
Choosing the right server management tool requires evaluating capabilities around:
- Depth of monitoring coverage
- Pre-built integrations
- ease of deployment
- Visualization and analytics built-in
- Flexible alerting options
- Compliance and security use cases
Let‘s explore 12 leading solutions in this space:
| Tool | Deployment | Infrastructure Scope | Notable Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | SaaS | Hybrid/Multi-Cloud | Leading platform, advanced analytics, infrastructure + log correlation |
| SolarWinds | On-premise | Mainly Windows environments | Specialized config monitoring, user tracking |
| ManageEngine | On-premise | Mainly on-premise infra | Broad coverage, automation features good for large environments |
| Centreon | Self-hosted | Generic heterogenous | Intuitive dashboards, strong alerting features |
| Nagios XI | Self-hosted | Generic heterogenous | Open-source foundation, extremely extensible |
| Zabbix | On-premise | Generic heterogenous | Scalable for large environs, highly customizable |
| Observium | Self-Hosted | Networking focus | Specialized for switches, routers, great dashboards |
| Netwrix Auditor | SaaS | Broad IT domain coverage | Specialized for compliance auditing, behavior analysis |
| Tenable | Hybrid | Broad security focus | Vulnerability monitoring, configuration assessment |
| Splunk | SaaS/On-prem | Logs & machine data | Powerful analytics capabilities for monitoring and security |
| Dynatrace | SaaS | Cloud-native focus | Leading next-gen cloud monitoring platform |
| Elastic | SaaS/On-prem | Observability data lake | Great analytics, consolidating monitoring data, security analytics |
As you assess options, consider factors like:
Total Cost of Ownership – Look beyond just license fees at personnel, training, integration expenses over 3-5 years.
Scalability – Cloud-based solutions often have an edge handling very dynamic, large scale environments.
Ease of deployment – If ramp up speed is critical, tools requiring less customization help get off the ground quicker.
Interoperability – Open standards aid integrating monitoring into workflows of other tools like helpdesk solutions.
Visualization – Powerful dashboards capable of correlating metrics, events and log data provide quicker insights.
Now let‘s look at steps for successful monitoring program implementation.
Best Practices for Server Monitoring
Once you‘ve picked a monitoring tool, follow these best practices for an effective rollout:
Establish asset inventory – Maintain a configuration management database (CMDB) with details around servers, their owners, locations, business functions etc.
Create service-centric views – Group dashboards by services rather than technical components for quicker diagnosis.
Implement change management – Enforce rigourous review and testing of monitoring rule changes.
Right size default rules – Start sane with alerts rather than overwhlem teams initially. Tune judiciously overtime.
Triage and respond – Have clearly documented playbooks for responding to common or critical alert scenarios.
Integrate monitoring into IT workflows – Sync events with ticket systems like ServiceNow allowing 2-way automation.
Conduct readiness drills – Regularly simulate incidents using monitoring capabilities to prove effectiveness.
Track KPI improvements – Quantify gains such as reduced mean time to repair (MTTR) over time.
Investing in these operational practices pays huge dividends maximizing return on monitoring tools.
Next we cover another pivotal topic – auditing.
Auditing Crucial for Compliance and Security
In addition to real-time monitoring, auditing configuration changes, user activities and permission changes provides vital historical visibility.
Auditing helps answer pivotal questions like:
- Who made what change and when?
- What suspicious activities occurred unseen earlier?
- Is operational drift occurring around policies?
Some examples of dangerous drift including creeping permission relaxation, software downgrades skipped etc.
Detailed auditing and reporting is critically important for meeting compliance mandates like:
- PCI DSS – requires extensive logging around access to cardholder data
- HIPAA – demands tracking access to medical records
- SOX – mandates financial controls monitoring
Beyond compliance, auditing also supercharges security efforts enabling use cases like:
- Attack investigation – audits of file modifications provide forensic evidence to trace attacker steps
- Breach correlations – linking audited configuration changes with external attack intelligence can connect the dots
- Compromised account detection – spots unusual permission and system alterations
As you evaluate monitoring tools take into account the depth of native or third-party auditing capabilities to enable such use cases above and beyond basic monitoring.
Server Monitoring for Incident Detection and Response
While most monitoring adoption focuses on availability and performance management, security teams are waking up to the major value better visibility provides.
Some examples include:
- Malware detection – infrastructure monitoring can reveal unusual network traffic, registry modifications and file changes signalling infection
- Supply chain backdoor discovery – filesystem monitoring helped spot early signs of compromised SolarWinds software spreading in victim environments
- Unauthorized app installs – common attack behaviour like droppers, miners and ransomware leaves tells detectable via server monitoring
- Account misuse – spikes in failed local admin logins often indicate brute force credential stuffing attacks in progress
Equipped with server monitoring data, understaffed security teams can quickly pivot to using powerful analytics built into leading platforms nowadays:
- Machine learning anomaly detection – identifies highly unusual usage deviations indicative of breach
- Log correlation rules – creates connections between suspicious events across app, user, network layers
- Forensic query languages – allows complex historical lookups to uncover stealthy persistent threat patterns
Forward-thinking CISOs are taking advantage of vast infrastructure monitoring telemetry already available rather than constantly collecting new niche security tools. Tight integration with existing SIEMs, SOARs and ticketing systems allows leveraging server monitoring to improve mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-respond on intrusions significantly.
Closing Recommendations
In closing, I hope this guide has provided a helpful starting point in your quest to level up server fleet reliability, compliance and security through robust monitoring and auditing practices.
Key takeways include:
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Prioritizing comprehensive visibility – across hardware, operating systems, configs, performance and user activities
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Correlating metrics, logs and events – for speedy diagnosis and powerful detection
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Automating remediation – via integration with IT workflows and security orchestration
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Learning continuously – to address inevitable blindspots and new attack techniques
Wishing you the very best on your server monitoring and auditing journey from here! Let me know if any other recommendations come to mind you‘d like to see in a future updated version of this guide.
