Your skilled game competition site may not have kicked off yet but it has lots of invisible enemies already. Spikes, outages, overloads - there is a lot of unpleasant things that can happen to a skilled game server. One minute you welcome Spot the Ball players and everything operates normally, the next – your customers are looking at an error page because your marketing campaign succeeded and too many people came to win a prize. No access to the game, no access to data, user accounts, transactions. Your competition site has a blackout. Maybe I/O spiked? Maybe it was RAM or CPU overload? Without proper server monitoring and reporting you’ll never know.

Can your brand risk infuriating the players and getting one-star reviews only because your skilled game providers were the cheaper option?
Cheaper means something is lacking – proper server monitoring, for example. But first, let’s establish why is that important and do you even need server monitoring.

What’s server monitoring?

Server Monitoring is a process to monitor server's system resources like CPU Usage, Memory Consumption, I/O, Network, Disk Usage, Process etc. Server Monitoring helps to understand the server's system resource usage which can help you better your capacity planning and provide a better end-user experience and ensure that things run smoothly. Which is the basis of the gamification marketing – unless things work smoothly the rest of the gamification methods and engagement mechanism won’t kick in.

All of the above is needed to make sure that your tasks – game software, databases, front-end sites, and everything that runs in the background, run smoothly and there are no unexpected outages and overloads and if there is any maintenance necessary – it will be done on time. With so many background tasks running in your servers, it can be quite difficult to know what is being written or modified to or from your files. A monitoring eye to notify of such changes would be a real time-saver to keep you aware of unauthorized access and save your precious data.

Depending on the complexity of the competition site and the server load, the tools needed for Some monitoring tools and software database providers will be more flexible and allow the process to be easier to apply and others will force you to do things their way.

To adapt to externalities or to do things your way is up to you, of course, but more often bespoke solutions that are developed for your particular business work better. At least in Tentacle Solutions’ experience.

Can you risk handling it all on your own? Or the risk of going for a cheaper option that can lead to the wrath of your skilled game players and the frustration of our employees when the servers go down? Is there any company that can afford that? Hardly.

With five servers of their own, Tentacle Solutions has a team dedicated to the server monitoring and maintenance, with their own set of protocols and procedures. They have developed and polished their methodology over the last fifteen years and have ensured the stability and comfort for hundreds of clients and their software databases.

If you had problems with your skilled game server, need an upgrade from your 64mb RAM Linux server and 30-year-old half-baked competition site, make sure to drop a line to Tentacle’s team and they’ll definitely come up with a solution for you.

Can your brand risk infuriating the players and getting one-star reviews.