These days one of the most important requirements to maintain quality service, other than great customer service, is server uptime. We use a combination of server side monitoring applications and 3rd party services that monitor different aspects of our servers. Using these services makes maintaining uptime and quality of service throughout PurgeHosting.com, easier. Luck for you, we’re going to share some of our secrets.
We’ll start off with server side monitoring services.
The Munin Service Monitor. (Visit Website) 
Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.
Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine “what’s different today” when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you’re doing capacity-wise on any resources.
Munin uses the excellent RRDTool (written by Tobi Oetiker) and the framework is written in Perl, while plugins may be written in any language. Munin has a master/node architecture in which the master connects to all the nodes at regular intervals and asks them for data. It then stores the data in RRD files, and (if needed) updates the graphs. One of the main goals has been ease of creating new plugins (graphs).
vnStat (Visit Website)

vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s). It uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won’t actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources. However, in Linux at least a 2.2 series kernel is required.
Now, here are our two favorite 3rd party monitoring services.
Pingdom (Visit Website)

With Pingdom it becomes easy to see how much downtime your site has (and when) and how responsive it is. Charts and tables show your uptime and performance over time, so it becomes easy to spot trends and potential problems.
Pingdom works because it checks the server’s availability from multiple places simultaneously. Whenever Pingdom detects an error, additional tests are automatically performed to help you with your troubleshooting and an alert is dispatched immediately. With Pingdom you can monitor websites, mail servers, DNS servers, FTP servers, networks, and much more.
Server Density (Visit Website)

Monitor CPU load, memory usage, processes, disk usage, network traffic and Apache status. Keep an eye on your servers and get e-mail/SMS alerts when things go wrong. Reported data is displayed on an interactive graph. Select date ranges or zoom in for a more granular view. Set up alerts for all checks to be notified by e-mail and/or SMS within minutes of things going wrong. View the state of your server at any point in time with a resource usage breakdown by process.
Thanks to these services, PurgeHosting is able to monitor every aspect of our servers. With all of these services combine, then we can keep track of every moment at any moment. And we’re the first to know, within seconds if any problem is to arise so that we can respond as quickly as possible. And in doing so, we’re able to preserve the quality of service you, as a PurgeHosting Client, receive every day.
Chris PurgeHosting