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Start Right Away with Install + Preset

The biggest barrier to adopting infrastructure monitoring is often not the agent installation itself, but the effort required to configure alerts and thresholds. Tools like Zabbix require you to set up alerts individually for each metric template, such as CPU, memory, and filesystem. WhaTap Server Monitoring is designed so that most monitoring metrics and alerts are preset and start working right after installation.

What Happens Automatically After the 1-2 Minute Install​

  1. Download and run the agent on the server you want to monitor — 1-2 minutes on average
  2. The agent connects to the project with Active status
  3. Key metrics start collecting automatically (CPU, memory, disk, network, process, filesystem, TCP, etc.)
  4. Preset alerts activate automatically — notifications are sent on anomalies without any manual threshold configuration
  5. From then on, updates only require running the updater

What the Presets Cover​

Common Monitoring Metrics​

  • CPU usage / load average
  • Memory / swap usage
  • Disk I/O / filesystem usage
  • Network traffic
  • Process count / zombie processes
  • TCP connection status

Metrics Specialized for Cloud Operations​

Based on know-how from operating tens of thousands of on-premises and cloud servers, the presets also cover metrics that matter especially in cloud environments:

  • CPU steal time — time the hypervisor withholds CPU from the instance (a common cause of cloud performance issues)
  • Swap usage — an early warning for memory shortages on cloud instances
  • Other metrics that come up frequently in cloud operations

Monitoring these metrics automatically, without manual setup, is a key difference from other tools.

From Preset to Customized​

Presets are a starting point, not the destination. As you operate, expand in the following order.

Step 1 — Run As-Is for a Few Days​

Leave the preset alerts as they are and observe for 2-3 days. Identify which alerts actually matter for your team and which are just noise.

Step 2 — Reflect Your Team's Context​

  • An important metric that never triggers an alert → add a custom event rule → Attach your first alert
  • An alert fires often but doesn't need a response → adjust the threshold or add throttling

Step 3 — Operate as a Team​

Consideration for Server Load​

WhaTap Server Monitoring is designed to keep the load on the monitored server under 2% CPU usage. It also has built-in safeguards for situations where load increases.

  • Automatically relaxes the process information collection interval to 60 seconds (default: 20 seconds) when server load increases
  • Automatically restarts the agent if it exceeds a certain memory or handle (Windows) usage

This lets the agent stay safely resident on production servers.

Usage Scenarios​

Onboarding a New Server (Under 5 Minutes)​

  1. Install the server agent → 1-2 minutes
  2. Confirm the agent is Active in the WhaTap console → 30 seconds
  3. Confirm the preset dashboard and alerts are working → 1 minute
  4. Announce the new agent in your team's Slack channel

Rolling Out to Dozens of Servers at Once​

  • Deploy the install script with a configuration management tool (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
  • Apply the same preset alerts to every server → eliminates the standardization problem of metric definitions differing team by team

Adopting Early for Incident Response​

  • Basic alerts work immediately after installation → minimizes the risk of missing early warning signs
  • Fine-tune thresholds gradually during operation

Next Steps​

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