Monitoring your server for activities in real-time is perhaps the most fun things to do for geeks like me. While most people would use some kind of loging script to look at preety data in html format I like mine raw and in realtime. I would log into my server over SSH and use these three tools to monitor my system:

1) htop : While most people probably will settle for top, htop is my choice. I can’t think of a better monitoring system than htop, and I can’t imagine how I would live without it. I used it regularly on my local system as well. Here I am enjoying my htop in action while logging into myserver over SSH:

2) Trafshow: This is a network monitoring utility that shows traffic source, and services it’s connecting to, ports being used, bytes being used. And so on and so forth. Very usefull utility:

3) tail -f: tailing apache logs, access logs, error logs and similar logs should be a priority.

There are other ways to log information and or setting up scripts to e-mail you when anything fishy comes up in log files. Than there is data integrity checker like tripwire. Like I said there are many other ways to track information about your server health and security but these are my main methods I use.

How do you monitor your network/server?