You can use the following tools to monitor servers:

• SharePoint Health Analyzer rules

  Built-in SharePoint Health Analyzer rules enable you to analyze and resolve issues in the following areas: security, performance, configuration, and availability. These rules are run at scheduled intervals, such as hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

• System Center 2012 - Operations Manager

  System Center 2012 - Operations Manager is a powerful monitoring platform that lets you monitor services, devices, and operations for many computers in a single console. Operations Manager enables you to view status, health, performance information, and alerts that Management Packs generate for availability, performance, configuration and security situations. For more information, see Operations Manager.

• Performance monitor

  Performance Monitor is a simple yet powerful visualization tool for viewing performance data, both in real time and from log files. You can examine performance data in a graph, histogram, or report. For more information, see Windows Performance Monitor.

• Logs

  You can use logs for diagnosis and troubleshooting. For more information, see Use logs.

You can use SharePoint Health Analyzer rules to monitor database servers, application servers, and web servers.

Monitor various servers

You can use the following SharePoint Health Analyzer rules to monitor hardware, software, and security of servers.

Monitor hardware, software, and security

For more information, see SharePoint Health Analyzer rules reference (SharePoint 2013).

Operations Manager enables you to monitor services, devices, and operations for many computers in a single console. For examples, administrators can use many views that show state, health, performance information, and alerts that Operations Manager generated for availability, performance, configuration and security situations. As a result, you can see the state of an IT environment and IT Services that are running across different services and workloads. Operators can gain rapid insight into the state of the IT environment and the IT services that are running across different systems and workloads by. For more information, see Operations Manager Monitoring Scenarios.

You can use System Center Management Pack for SharePoint Server 2013 to monitor events, collect performance counters that are specific to SharePoint components in one central location, and raise alerts for operator intervention as necessary. For more information, see System Center Monitoring Pack for SharePoint Server 2013 or System Center Monitoring Pack for SharePoint Foundation 2013.

You can use Network Load Balancing (NLB) to enhance the scalability and availability of server applications when you use System Center Management Pack for SharePoint Server 2013. For more information, see Network Load Balancing.

Windows Performance Monitor uses performance counters, event trace data, and configuration information, which can be combined into Data Collector Sets.

For more information, see Windows Performance Monitor.

You can use diagnostic logs, and health and data collection logs to monitor servers. For more information, see Configure diagnostic logging in SharePoint 2013 and Configure usage and health data collection in SharePoint 2013.

You can check Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs for troubleshooting. For more information, see ULS Viewer, for SharePoint 2010 Troubleshooting.

Note:
This information for SharePoint 2010 also applies to SharePoint 2013.