Review: Bijk.com – Server Monitoring Solution

Recently I have been looking at Bijk.com and testing it out to see how it holds up as a Server Monitoring solution.

The Bijk.com Server Monitoring interface is clean, feature packaged and rather sexy to look at. The dashboard combines most if not all of the stats into a nice place to view your servers status and see helpful charts which show things like CPU, Load, Memory and Traffic usage over a period of time. The best bit about this is you can easily change the graphs, simply click the change graphs button and you can drag and drop the graphs you want to see into the box. The software tracks a fantastic number of useful points about your servers right down to Disk Operations, CPU Per Process, file system usage and much more, there’s 50+ to choose from.

This comes with some great alert features too to inform you when things go wrong.

The easy to use interface makes it really simple to setup alerts for all aspects of the server, and depending on your subscription package it includes SMS Alerts. A fantastic option to keep the server admins in the know about when they need to get to work. This includes options to have SMS when it is back up, and you can also opt to have it resent the notifications at a set increment should it remain down. When I was testing this the SMS verification came through almost instantly and alerts seem to be prompt when there are issues. Fast notifications are a key benefit when keeping on top of servers, particularly if they are critical.

I also particularly like the refresh timer in the corner, it’s only a small point but its a great example of those little features which have been properly thought about and “just works”.

Overall the software has some very nifty features and looks brilliant, however there are a few downsides. I had some troubles with the server side program which collects the data to send back to them, it seemed to be eating up a load of server resources (150 – 180Mb) before being killed by the firewall automatically, this is quite a problem with running it on a VPS with only 768Mb and is a bit excessive for a monitoring software.

Unfortunately due to this I missed out on seeing the benefits of some of those really nifty stats and figures which would be very helpful. I have spoken with the guys at Bijk and it seems this is a bit of an anomaly and it normally only uses 20 – 30mb on their Debian & RedHat servers so hopefully I can work with them to reduce the resource imprint and can do a follow up review on that soon.

Support is good, but a little slow with responses however they have now added live chat support and are planning to provide US and UK phone numbers which will hopefully boost the support offered and bring this up to the same level as the service.

After providing some feedback it seems there are a lot of helpful tweaks and features on the way and I am looking forward to seeing this service develop as it really gets on its feet, to definitely worth checking it out.

Definitely worth checking out, Bijk.com they even give you a 2 week free trial!

Tags: Bijk, review, server monitoring, server resources