What are VPS Server Uptime Monitoring Tools?
VPS server uptime monitoring tools help you control the status of your VPS, websites, or apps to see whether they’re online and accessible. Some tools include UptimeRobot, UptimeKuma, Better Stack, Pingdom, StatusCake, Site24x7, and Datadog. Uptime monitoring tools provide features to track response time and availability of server resources and the network. These tools help resolve issues and alert you when downtime occurs.
Introduction
A VPS can be unresponsive at any time without any warning. Monitoring your VPS can let you know when your server becomes unresponsive and the cause of that unresponsiveness. This can be done by monitoring the availability and response time of the server, website, API, or other services. Some of the more popular tools to do this include UptimeRobot, Better Uptime, Pingdom, StatusCake, Site24x7, and Datadog. It is also possible to monitor your server’s resources and performance using other tools. How deeply you want to monitor your server will determine the tool that you end up using. If you are looking for reliable VPS hosting, choosing a provider with stable infrastructure and ongoing technical support can also help reduce server-related issues.
What is VPS Server Uptime Monitoring?
VPS server uptime monitoring works by continuously checking a server’s availability and status by sending requests and checking if a response message is received within a set time frame. If you are new to VPS infrastructure, our guide on what is VPS hosting explains how virtual private servers work and how they differ from other hosting environments.
In the case of an unavailable status, the software captures the response message, if any, and determines the status of the service. If the status is unavailable, the software notifies the user of the status via email or text message and logs the event. The software measures and logs the time it takes to receive a response message.
What Should You Monitor on a VPS Server?
Monitoring a VPS is more than a website availability check. The server can be reachable while the CPU and memory are being utilized to their limits. It can even go so far as to use all of the available space on the server. The only way to avoid these would be to monitor the server’s metrics.
| Metric | What it tells you |
| Uptime | Whether the VPS is active or not |
| CPU usage | Whether the server is handling more processing work than it can comfortably manage |
| RAM usage | Whether available memory is getting low and could affect running applications |
| Disk space | Whether the server is running out of room for files, databases, logs, or backups |
| Network traffic | Whether incoming and outgoing traffic is behaving as expected |
| Response time | How quickly the server or a monitored service responds to requests |
| SSL certificate | Whether an SSL certificate is valid and nearing its expiration date |
What Are the Best VPS Server Uptime Monitoring Tools?
A good monitoring tool should provide information about every aspect of your VPS. Some tools only show if your server is online. Others can tell you how your server is performing and alert you to potential problems. Each of the following tools provides monitoring at different levels.
1. UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is a web monitoring tool to help determine the status of websites, servers, ports, and APIs. There are many ways to monitor a particular URL. These include HTTP(S), ping, port, keyword, DNS, and other methods. When a URL goes down, alerts can be sent using various methods.
It is a good option for an individual or small group of people to help ensure website or server uptime. It is important to note that while the service is enough for many website monitoring needs, it should not be a substitute for a more comprehensive server monitoring and observability tool for true server- and application-level monitoring.
2. Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma provides an open-source, self-hosted alternative. Traditionally, users have to depend on a hosted monitoring service to set up a monitoring system.
Uptime Kuma provides several monitoring features, like HTTP(S) and TCP monitoring, ping and DNS tests, WebSockets and push-based monitoring, as well as monitoring of Docker containers. It can notify users through services like Telegram and Discord, as well as Slack, email, and several other services. It also provides templates to create and host your own status page.
In the case of a VPS, users are often concerned about the location of their data and where their software is installed. Uptime Kuma addresses those concerns. That said, users will have to handle the entire jurisdiction of their monitoring system, including, but not limited to, upgrades and security.
3. Better Stack
Better Stack provides advanced server uptime monitoring. Incident management ties into uptime monitoring, along with alerting, status page creation, logging, and other tools that improve incident visibility.
Better Stack helps monitor server uptime by checking the status of URLs or IP addresses. If a server goes down, it automatically creates an incident and shows it to the user through the interface. Better Stack offers the ability to create status pages to show end users the status of a service.
Better Stack is ideal for teams who wish to have monitoring tied directly to their incident response workflow.
4. Pingdom
Pingdom does website performance and availability testing. With its tests located around the world, it can check website availability. It stores testing data and creates statistics on response times, page performance, and transactions.
Pingdom can also monitor website transactions. A transaction can be something like a website user completing an online purchase. This feature can monitor any transaction on a website and can even monitor transactions for a website hosted on a virtual private server (VPS).
Because Pingdom can monitor website transactions, it can also be used to monitor less critical transactions, like a user completing a search or registration on a website.
5. StatusCake
StatusCake offers extended functionality with its monitoring services. Customers can add, on top of basic uptime checks, services such as page speed and SSL monitoring, domain and server monitoring, and more.
This is beneficial to website owners and VPS customers, as they can monitor website availability as well as check for other potential issues such as an unhealthy server, a slow page, or an expired SSL certificate.
StatusCake’s server monitoring can also check a server’s health and resources.
6. Site24x7
Site24x7 specializes in monitoring servers and infrastructure. While it can check website availability and uptime, it also measures the performance of infrastructure and network resources. It can provide performance metrics for a server, in addition to availability.
Because of this, it’s well-suited for cloud and VPS environments, in addition to measuring server uptime and availability. It provides additional metrics and insights into a VPS, as opposed to just whether a server is responding to a request.
7. Datadog
Datadog offers a wide-scope monitoring solution with features such as infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, log management, and synthetic monitoring.
With Datadog, you can monitor your VPS at the host level, analyze your application’s behavior, and also review logs and traces. Datadog is typically used by large organizations to help gain insight into larger infrastructure and application environments. It can also be used to set up simple alerts for small applications and infrastructure.
How Do You Choose a VPS Server Monitoring Tool?
First, monitor the VPS to know which tools to use; tools with more features can be complicated to use. A small business just needs a tool that notifies when the website goes down, but for large businesses, notifications are not sufficient it needs proper monitoring.
1. Monitoring Type
An external monitor may be all the customer service center is looking for. However, a more complete solution may provide a dashboard that shows vital signs of the customer service server and application, as well as provide notifications based on thresholds, define actions, integrate with third-party applications, and help determine root causes of issues.
2. Alerting Options
Your ability to identify an issue will be limited by the available alerting mechanisms. Consider extending the alerting endpoints to email, SMS, various chat apps, and webhooks. Think of ways to improve alerting to provide enough information to take the necessary action to resolve an issue. The best approaches will not rely on a dashboard.
3. Check Frequency
The frequency setting is used to set an outage time. Lower frequency settings result in faster detection of outage time and therefore more quickly triggered outages. Essentially, a trade-off must be made between how quickly an outage is declared and the settings of the required factors of our monitoring systems.
4. Monitoring Locations
There are issues with monitoring from a single location, such as not being able to identify the true location of a network issue. It can create a false representation of a server failure. A failure can occur in a different location in the network. It is best to review failures in multiple locations.
5. Self-Hosted vs. Cloud-Based
There are benefits to having your own monitoring solution in that you control more of your environment. However, you add a solution to your environment that requires management and, in a sense, increases the attack surface of your environment. It is good practice to rely on a third-party monitoring solution for critical services.
6. Pricing and Scalability
Of course, look at pricing, but also look at all aspects of the plan. User and server limits, methods of notifications, the retention policy, and the interval of check-ins are other aspects of the plan you should evaluate. The free plan is good for monitoring 1 VPS, but if your company expands and you need to monitor more, you’re going to have to pay for a higher plan.
How Do You Monitor VPS Server Uptime?
Constant checking of VPS uptime is not necessary. There are external services that can check server availability and notify the administrator if the server doesn’t return the expected result.
1. Pick a Monitoring Service
The type of service needed depends on needs and requirements. An easier, less intensive service may be all that is required. On the other hand, the administrator may need a service that collects information and reports on the server’s health and usage. This may include the collection of CPU, memory, disk, and network usage statistics.
2. Add the VPS Endpoint
The user can monitor different types of services using arbitrary input (IPs, URLs, or domain names). The tool will do checks against the provided inputs.
3. Set the Check Interval & Alerts
You can choose how frequently endpoints should be tested and where failure notifications should be sent. Email is sufficient for notifications in simpler configurations, but for more complicated configurations where a service should be considered to have failed, notifications can be sent via SMS or any of many other services, including Telegram, Slack, and webhooks.
4. Test the Setup
Do not depend on the alerts if configurations on the monitor have not been tested. Use the tools provided to verify alerts, or manually trigger a test. Once the alerts have been verified, work can be done to analyze recent outages and report response time statistics using uptime reports.
Ensure the monitor is not physically hosted on the VPS. If a monitoring tool is installed on a VPS to monitor other services hosted on the same VPS, an outage of the VPS will result in the monitoring tool also becoming unavailable. It is best practice to have the monitoring service hosted on a different system.
Keep Your VPS Available With Reliable Monitoring
Uptime monitoring helps let admins know if there are any issues with their server. There are a few key aspects to having a reliable server, and good infrastructure is only one part of it. Other factors include VPS backup best practices and security. Reliable backups can help you recover more quickly when a server failure, configuration problem, or other incident causes downtime.
Cantech’s VPS hosting provides clients with a good infrastructure to host their website or app.
FAQs
How do I monitor my VPS server uptime?
You need to provide your VPS’s IP address, domain name, or application endpoint for monitoring. A third-party service will perform an uptime check and send you the result if it is unable to reach your server and get a response.
How can I check if my VPS server is down?
You can set up HTTP or TCP monitors or a ping monitor to check your server’s uptime. If you think your VPS is up and running, but the monitors show it’s down, you can check it using your SSH account or hosting control panel. Generally speaking, other monitors will agree with your SSH account.
What is the difference between VPS monitoring and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring services track if a website or server is up and running. VPS monitoring services track various resources, including the server’s processor, random access memory (RAM), storage, and network.
Can I monitor a VPS server for free?
Yes. Uptime Kuma is a free and open-source option that users can host themselves. Some commercial services offer a free version or trial. Uptime Kuma is more limited than the commercial options.
How often should a VPS server be monitored?
More important services typically have checks done on them every 2 to 5 minutes. This is the case for many websites. Less critical services can be checked less frequently. In this case, the check interval should be based on the judgment of an administrator as to the service’s importance and how long it may be down before it becomes a problem.
