WMI. Internet server monitoring Monitoring an internet server means that the server owner always knows if one or all of his services go down. Server monitoring may be internal, i.e. web server software checks its status and notifies the owner if some services go down, and external, i.e. some web server monitoring companies check the status of the services with a certain frequency. Server monitoring can encompass a check of system metrics, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network performance and disk space. It can also include application monitoring, such as checking the processes of programs such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, Nginx, Postgres and others. External monitoring is more reliable, as it keeps on working when the server completely goes down. Good server monitoring tools also have performance benchmarking, alerting capabilities and the ability to link certain thresholds with automated server jobs, such as provisioning more memory or performing a backup. Servers around the globe Network monitoring services usually have several servers around the globe - for example in America, Europe, Asia, Australia and other locations. By having multiple servers in different geographic locations, a monitoring service can determine if a Web server is available across different networks worldwide. The more the locations used, the more complete the picture of network availability. Web server monitoring process When monitoring a web server for potential problems, an external web monitoring service checks several parameters. First of all, it monitors for a proper HTTP return code. By HTTP specifications RFC 2616, any web server returns several HTTP codes. Analysis of the HTTP codes is the fastest way to determine the current status of the monitored web server. Third-party application performance monitoring tools provide additional web server monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities. Notification As the information brought by web server monitoring services is in most cases urgent and may be of crucial importance, various notification methods may be used: e-mail, landline and cell phones, messengers, SMS, fax, pagers, etc. See also Notes and references External links List of Network Monitoring and Management Tools at Stanford University Network management de:Network monitoring