What Is Server Monitoring vs Website Monitoring?

Server monitoring tracks internal resources like CPU, memory, and disk usage. Website monitoring checks external availability—whether users can access your site. Server monitoring answers "is the machine healthy?" while website monitoring answers "can users reach us?"

You typically need both: website monitoring detects problems, and server monitoring explains them.

Server Monitoring Explained

Server monitoring uses an agent installed on your server to collect metrics:

• CPU usage — Processing capacity available
• Memory (RAM) — Application memory consumption
• Disk space — Storage availability
• Disk I/O — Read/write performance
• Network — Bandwidth and connectivity
• Processes — What's running and consuming resources

How It Works

Your Server
├── Monitoring Agent (small program)
│   ├── Reads /proc/cpuinfo
│   ├── Reads /proc/meminfo
│   ├── Checks disk stats
│   └── Monitors processes
│
└── Sends metrics to dashboard every 30 seconds

What Server Monitoring Catches

• Memory leaks before they crash your app
• Disk filling up before writes fail
• CPU saturation causing slow responses
• Runaway processes consuming resources

Website Monitoring Explained

Website monitoring sends requests from external servers to check availability:

• HTTP/HTTPS checks — Does the page load?
• TCP checks — Is the port accepting connections?
• DNS checks — Does the domain resolve?
• SSL checks — Is the certificate valid?
• Response time — How fast is the response?

How It Works

Monitoring Servers (US, EU, Asia)
│
├── Send HTTP request to your site
├── Check response code (200 OK?)
├── Validate response content
├── Measure response time
│
└── Alert if something fails

What Website Monitoring Catches

• Site completely down
• Regional outages
• SSL certificate issues
• Slow response times
• DNS problems

Key Differences

Why You Need Both

Consider this scenario:

Website Monitoring Alert: "API returning 503 errors"

Without server monitoring:

1. SSH into server
2. Run htop, free, df
3. Search through logs
4. Eventually find CPU at 100%
5. Time to diagnosis: 15+ minutes

With server monitoring:

1. See alert alongside server metrics
2. Dashboard shows CPU at 100%
3. Process list shows runaway worker
4. Time to diagnosis: 30 seconds

The combination reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) dramatically.

Common Mistakes

1. Only Using Website Monitoring

You know something is wrong but not why. Every incident requires SSH sessions and manual investigation.

2. Only Using Server Monitoring

A server can show healthy metrics while the application is broken due to:

• Code bugs
• Configuration errors
• External dependency failures
• Network routing issues

3. Using Separate Tools

Switching between dashboards during incidents wastes time. Integrated monitoring shows correlated data.

4. Monitoring Too Much

Tracking hundreds of metrics creates noise. Focus on:

• CPU, memory, disk (server)
• HTTP status and response time (website)

Add more only when needed.

Comparison: Monitoring Tool Approaches

Tools that only do website monitoring leave you blind to infrastructure issues. Full observability platforms like Datadog do both but are complex and expensive.

When Wakestack Is a Good Fit

Wakestack bridges the gap—website monitoring plus essential server metrics without enterprise complexity:

• Integrated view — See uptime and server health together
• Nested hosts — Group monitors by infrastructure
• Lightweight agent — Single Go binary, minimal resources
• Status pages included — Communicate with users
• Simple pricing — $29/month, not per-host

Example Dashboard View

Production API Server
├── HTTP /api/health — ⚠️ Slow (3.2s)
├── CPU — 89% ⚠️
├── Memory — 72%
├── Disk — 45%
└── Process: node — 85% CPU ← Root cause

Try Wakestack free — Includes website and server monitoring.

Quick Decision Guide

Use Website Monitoring Only If:

• You use serverless/PaaS (Vercel, Heroku, Lambda)
• You don't have SSH access to servers
• You only care about "is it up?"

Use Both If:

• You manage your own servers (VPS, EC2, bare metal)
• You need to diagnose issues quickly
• You want proactive alerts before outages

Use Full Observability If:

• You have complex microservices
• You need distributed tracing
• Budget supports $300+/month

Key Takeaways

• Server monitoring = internal health (CPU, memory, disk)
• Website monitoring = external availability (can users reach it?)
• Use both for complete visibility
• Integrated tools reduce context switching during incidents
• Start simple, add complexity only when needed

Related Resources

• Server Monitoring: Complete Guide
• Pingdom Alternative
• 10 Status Page Best Practices