A fast website needs a good server – as a webmaster, this is something I reckon you’ve heard time and again while working to improve your sites. But hey, what exactly does make a hosting server “better” in terms of performance? Well, it can mean a lot of things – and therein the problem lies. So to better understand ways to boost your websites, you need first to grasp what server metrics you should be decoding, why, and how exactly you can learn from them & use them to give your sites a quick push up the stairs.
Don’t forget; there’s nothing more detrimental to a website’s success than a poor hosting performance level. So in this post, I’ve put together a list of all the key metrics you should monitor every day for a nicer web-experience.
Well, what are we waiting for?
Let’s get cracking!
But Wait, Why Is Web Server Monitoring Important?
Fueling the inner workings of a site, a web server provides a slew of important functions, meaning there is so much to keep track of.
They include;
- Connections to clients and other servers on the network
- Requests that facilitates hosting resources such as CPU, RAM and disk/memory accesses
- Traffic levels between to and from the servers at any given time
- Availability rendered to other servers for proxy requests and other needs
As the brain behind a website, a spruced up, well-monitored hosting server can deliver an immediate & noticeable boost your websites user experience. And, of course, it can readily alert you of bothersome errors that may lead to downtimes. Secondly, it helps with automation, which is the Holy Grail for websites. And lastly, (yup, there’s more) monitoring can also help you track the popularity & growth of your sites in real-time – giving a more in-depth insight into your site’s total activities, including active users, session lengths, etc…
In other words, monitoring your site’s hosting server metrics is the ultimate way to redefine and refresh them for the better, entirely. Find answers to your complex hosting related terms.
Monitoring Hosting Server Metrics to Look out for Today!
Requests Per Second (RPS)
Also known as the “throughput,” RPS is just like it sounds – it the total number of requests your server receives every second. The more the requests, the harder your server hast to work to keep them in check.
Usually, the RPS is tabulated as a total count of all the requests received during a certain measurement period, where the period is correlated as seconds. Ideally, the period should fall under 1 – 5 minutes – the shorter, the better.
Remember: given enough load, any server can fall – and keeping an eye on RPS is one of the better ways to help avoid that.
Error Rates
No matter how good a server is, errors are unavoidable, especially when processing requests and are under a heavier load. This includes HTTP errors, internal errors, and of course, the infamous timed out fails.
Normally, it’s not really possible to define the exact tolerance for error rate as its mostly temperamental, and changes per sites & applications. That said, some consider an error rate of less than 1% good. that said, normally you must try & minimize their levels further to avoid issues of performance & reliability.
And of course, this is exactly where keeping an eye on this particular hosting metric can come in tremendously handy!
Average Response Times (ART)
Again, Average Response Time or ART is exactly as it sounds like – the perfect, average time it takes for a server to respond to all the requests given to it. the lower the ART, the better, with 1 second being the sweet spot.
In laymen terms, this metric is a reflection of the speed a website/application carries – a top indicator to their performance, offered from a user’s perspective. That said, it still an average, meaning that its changes per basis.
What does it mean for you? Well, keeping a closer look at this metric, you can fine-tune your website/apps content and speeds so that it can deliver the perfect experiences your users want and deserve – a performance boost, really.
Peak Response Time (PRT)
Similar to ART, the PRT also measures the overall round trip length of request/response cycles, however, the Peak Response Time is instead designed to tell us what the longest cycle is at that point in the testing scenario.
In general, both ART and PRT needs to be sub-average. But when they start becoming more comparable, that’s where the problem happens, indicating an anomaly within the server. In General, the PRT helps pinpoint the bother in question. In any case, the standard measure of PRT is considered in milliseconds.
The Uptime
In simple words, uptime refers to the time that a server has been “alive” & running properly. On average, it reflects the reliability and availability of the server, and obviously, the overall time should be as long as possible.
I’m not getting into the math here. But the time range can mostly be calculated as ab absolute value or as a certain percentage between actual server uptime & ideal server uptime – the lower the difference, the better.
In our opinion, your hosting server should offer a minimum of 99% of uptime for everyday needs & anything less than 95% is very bad.
CPU Utilization
For those who don’t know, CPU utilization refers to the amount of CPU time used by the website or application while rendering a request. It’s often calculated in percentage, with most having a graphical interface to boot.
Under this metric, it should never max out at 100%. If it happens, additional actions may need to be taken as it points to either a problem in your apps or website or to a capacity inequality on the hosting machine – the lower it is, the better.
Note; the above criteria holds true for Memory utilization levels too.
Thread Counting
On average, a website or application can generate a ton of threads to process all the requests it receives every second. Usually limited by the system itself, this is an important metric to consider as it directly correlates to the stability of a system, with too many threads indicating bothers in the applications or websites.
Obviously, the total count of existing threads must be proportional to the load & inversely also the same with the P-time to the requests.
Hardware Utilization
Put simply, any application or server running is limited by the resources allocated to it. being so, keeping an eye on this metric is very important, especially when it comes to determining if a resource bottleneck exists.
On average, there are three major aspects to consider:
- The processor
- The Memory (RAM available)
- The disk space
By keeping an eye over these, you can easily pinpoint bottlenecks, if any, and can also tell what parts need to be updated to help fix it.
Crucial Hosting Server Metrics – the Final Say So
Don’t forget: good performance is only as strong as its weakest link. And by keeping these metrics in check, you can definitely improve your site’s performance for the better, that too for longer stretches.
That said, don’t try to measure all these metrics at once, as it can be overwhelming and may get you addicted to trying & improve the numbers on your Google-analytics dashboard, which don’t necessarily translate to a better outcome.
Instead, try and focus on producing real insights from the metrics you’re trying to decode – insights that you can convert to real actionable knowledge that can actually make a difference as far as reader experience goes.
So yeah, which metrics are YOU tracking now on your servers? We’d like to know. Throw us a shout below &we’ll get back to you ASAP
Well then, until next time,
Ciao!
server room concept -DepositPhotos
