How to Monitor the RAM Usage of a Server

This KB will instruct you on how to monitor the RAM usage of a server using the Cloudways Platform and view the free memory of a server.

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Written by Cloudways Product
Updated over a week ago

This KB will instruct you on how to monitor the RAM usage of a server easily using the Cloudways Platform as well as to view the free memory of a server with graphical representation. You will also learn about checking the memory consumption of a specific application. Cloudways highly recommend that you keep checking the server and application monitoring section of the platform, so you are aware of the current health of your server and applications.

Visiting the Server Monitoring Section

Here are a few simple steps to visit the server monitoring section of the Cloudways platform to view the RAM usage.

Step# 1

Log in to the Cloudways Platform, then click on the Servers tab from the top menu bar, and choose your target server.

Next, click on the Monitoring option from the left menu bar to load the server usage information.

Step# 2

Here, the Summary and Details tabs are the most important because that is where all server resources utilization statistics and graphs are located.

The Summary tab here presents a quick summary of the utilization of four major server resources. These resources get updated on their defined time.

Memory Monitoring Section

RAM Usage

These statistics show the RAM utilization recorded recently. Statistics get updated every five minutes automatically. RAM usage is calculated using this formula:

actual ram usage = ram usage - cache ram usage

If you want to see further details/trends or understand the RAM consumption over the desired period, refer to the Details tab of the monitoring page.

View Free Memory and Auto-healing Restart Statistics

You may visit the Details tab of the monitoring section and select a Free memory option from the dropdown menu. Choose the duration (default: one hour) to view a graphical representation of the free memory of the server. Free memory is unused memory, so the higher the graph is, the better the applications will work. Else, if it is consistently below 100 MB, your applications will malfunction and start crashing.

If you see no data available warning, then it means that no data was available recorded on your selected time stamp so you may consider changing the duration (e.g., last seven days).

Important

Here, X-Axis represents the time whereas, Y-Axis represents the Memory in MegaBytes (MBs). These are interactive graphs so you can hover your cursor over to any coordinates to read the specific information at that given instant.

You can access the information about the Auto Healing Restarts as well as using the same dropdown menu. Auto-healing restarts happen when a service has been killed due to low memory. Our Monitoring system tries to restart it automatically, and recurrent service restarts will deteriorate your visitors’ experience.

Check Memory Consumption

You can also view the memory consumption information of a specific application by switching to the Summary tab and expanding the Application Wise Details section, as shown in the screenshot below.

If you see no data available warning, then it means that no data was available recorded on your selected timestamp.

You have learned how to check the RAM usage of a server. If you are running low on server resources, or if your server is frequently getting restarted because of low memory, then you can always upscale the server effortlessly on Cloudways Platform.

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.

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