Hardware Monitor - Server Hardware Monitoring Software | SolarWinds (2023)

What is a hardware monitor?

A hardware monitor is a software application used for hardware health monitoring. Hardware monitor software can collect a wide range of information related to hardware health, including CPU, temperature, and fan speed.

How does a hardware monitor work?

A hardware monitoring tool works by polling data from across a system using hardware health sensors. A hardware monitoring tool collects all the data it receives from these sensors and is designed to make this information useful by sending alerts when thresholds are crossed and visually displaying the data values using graphs located in a centralized dashboard.

With server hardware monitoring software, you can monitor the status, health, and availability of the most critical elements of your servers with real-time statistics about the status of fans, power supplies, and temperature. Hardware monitor software can also notify you as soon as it detects an unexpected hardware health status change, so you can prevent the system from crashing or other performance problems due to a hardware malfunction.

Some of the key metrics that server hardware monitoring software should be able to collect and display include:

Power supply status: A server can be degraded due to over- or under-voltage in the power supply, so monitoring electrical power is a critical element of hardware health monitoring.

Fan status: If the fan speed isn’t adequate or the fan isn’t working, having a fan monitor is critical to ensuring you maintain a functional core temperature.

Temperature: It’s important to have a CPU heat monitor, since increases in CPU consumption can easily lead to increases in hardware temperature. Ideally, the CPU temperature should remain as cold as possible. A CPU running hot without cooling can cause the entire system to crash, potentially causing permanent damage to the processor.

Why is a hardware monitor important?

A hardware monitor is important because many system outages are caused by hardware failures. Many factors—including high server temperatures, fan failures, and peaks or drops in voltage—can all affect server performance. If a server overheats or overloads, you risk real damage to the device and potential downtime harming your business.

Without hardware monitoring, identifying issues from power fluctuations to high CPU load can be challenging. When problems arise, they may take longer to solve, meaning your business is interrupted for even longer. Sometimes temperature increases due to problems like hardware malfunctions or code errors can cause significant issues for system performance, but you might lack awareness of the issue if you rely on manual hardware monitoring.

Through effective server hardware health monitoring, you can help significantly reduce system outages caused by hardware health issues and keep your hardware running smoothly. Hardware monitoring can also help you prevent potential issues and identify the root causes of hardware problems when they arise.

What does hardware monitor software do?

Hardware monitor software collects metrics from sensors across the servers on your network to help you prevent outages and maintain quality system performance. Hardware health monitoring can involve power supply monitoring, temperature monitoring, fan monitoring, and more. The best hardware monitoring tools can support remote hardware monitoring in addition to monitoring both physical and virtual servers.

The best server hardware monitoring software is extremely customizable, letting you determine your own thresholds, set temperature measures as either Fahrenheit or Celsius, and decide which statistics you want collected and displayed.

One of the most important features in a server hardware monitoring tool is the ability to send real-time alerts when the values polled reach the threshold value. Devices and sensors often have preset thresholds, but you can set your own thresholds based on the specific needs of your network and systems. A hardware monitoring tool can provide invaluable and ongoing visibility into the status of your server health.

How does hardware monitoring work in Server Performance & Configuration Bundle?

Server hardware monitoring can be overwhelming when you have multiple server hardware vendors and operating systems requiring multiple monitoring tools. SolarWinds Server Performance & Configuration Bundle includes both Server & Application Monitor and Server Configuration Monitor and is designed to cover all your hardware monitoring requirements. Together, these two tools make up a powerful hardware monitor software built to help you more easily keep your IT infrastructure up and running.

The centralized dashboard view in SPCB allows you to see information about both the hardware and the software in your network in a single view, no matter what vendors are behind those products. In fact, the hardware monitoring tool is designed to let you monitor multi-vendor servers, applications, and databases from a single, customizable view using SAM templates. Plus, the integrated asset inventory tool from SCM allows you to see an up-to-date list of your software and hardware assets.

The hardware monitor capabilities in SPCB contain many features making it a great server temperature monitor software solution. Not only is it built to help you proactively monitor server and application performance, it also includes remote hardware monitoring capabilities. This means you can keep an eye on hardware health metrics for remote environments alongside on-premises.

SPCB also comes with the ability to track system and application changes. This means you can see whenever software or hardware is removed, added, or updated. You can also compare the new configuration to previous configurations from a single view. This helps you quickly locate the root cause of any hardware health problems caused by software or hardware changes.

SPCB is a powerful hardware performance monitor built to help you prevent outages and performance degradation resulting from hardware failures. This highly customizable set of tools can help keep your IT infrastructure, and therefore your business, running smoothly.