What keeps server administrators up at night?
One of the issues I often worry about is server load during an online event where the potential for traffic may go through the roof.
Recently, we needed to provide a client (moneyroundboxing.com) with live-streaming for an event in Florida. Live streaming is notoriously difficult as it incurs different demands on the server than normal website hosting.
Reliability is crucial for the event and even the smallest amount of downtime would be catastrophic; our viewer expect and deserve a great experience throughout the entire match.
In order to catch potential issues early, I wanted to make sure we had a solid solution in place for monitoring the servers and quickly resolving any problems that arose during the event. We’ve been using Virtyx for monitoring our servers here at SERPCOM for the past several months, and it seemed to fit the bill for our live-streaming requirements as well. In preparation for the event, we spun up a streaming server and installed the Virtyx agent on it. For this event we focused on three key metrics for reliability: CPU, memory, and network usage.
Once installed the Virtyx agent automatically starts collecting these metrics, allowing us to quickly moving on to setting the server. One of our favorite Virtyx features here at SERPCOM is the cloud shell, which we use for our day-to-day operations whenever we need access to any of our servers. It’s pretty convenient to always have access to your servers, regardless of where you are or which computer you’re using.
For the live stream, in addition to using Virtyx to keep tabs on our server stats, we also had immediate access to the machine in case we needed to troubleshoot or fix problems. Thankfully, nothing came up that we needed to resolve live, but contingency planning is always important. Using Virtyx during our recent live-stream event worked out very well.
In addition to using it for our every day monitoring/alerting and devops tasks, we’ll definitely be using it again next time we need to do a live stream.
In server monitoring it’s Virtyx by a TKO.
SERPCOM is a full-service Boston digital marketing agency focused on improving online visibility, increasing traffic, raising revenue and providing SEO services.
