Top 8 Network Monitoring Software Tools
ZabbixDatadogSolarWinds NPMLogicMonitorPRTG Network MonitorSCOMPlixer ScrutinizerPandora FMS
Popular Comparisons The performance and bandwidth are valuable features.
Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources.
Popular Comparisons Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc.
The application performance monitoring is pretty good.
Popular Comparisons We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down.
The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.
Popular Comparisons Whenever we reach out to our customers, we give LogicMonitor as a dashboard to them so they don't need to monitor the hardware side separately. For example, if my service is running on their hardware X, that means they don't need to monitor hardware X and our services too. LogicMonitor has the capability of monitoring their hardware as well as our services. This is how LogicMonitor helps us.
Popular Comparisons Technical support has been very helpful so far.
The solution is easy to manage and the reports are very accurate.
Popular Comparisons It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing. The discovery works in an automatic way, and it has a dynamic way of discovering the components, assets, and applications. It doesn't require any manual intervention.
Popular Comparisons We didn't experience any bugs.
It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic.
Popular Comparisons It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product.
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Advice From The Community
Read answers to top Network Monitoring Software questions. 511,773 professionals have gotten help from our community of experts. | Henry Steinhauer Systems Engineer at a tech services company |
With the security issues associated with SolarWinds - are people switching to other vendors? Which ones are you switching to?
See all 9 answers »
 | Rony_Sklar Community Manager at IT Central Station |
There are many network monitoring tools out there - some free, most paid. What software do you think is best for a large enterprise?
reviewer775476 (Network Engineer at a government with 51-200 employees)Real User
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring.
It is easy to survey basic topics with only one tool (state active or not). But I think with my experience that's better to split the network side and the datacenter side. By exemple, the monitoring of the configurations have sense only for network devices, with real-time alerting. For this purpose, we use Solarwinds NCM. For the network devices, the monitoring of the topology is also important.
For routers devices, a netflow collector is very useful to know the kind of the trafic. And also a good syslog collector (feature included in NCM)
reviewer1140534 (Director, Middle East, East India & SAARC at a tech company with 51-200 employees)Real User
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective.
You can check LogicMonitor, InfraonIMS (EverestIMS Technologies), Thousand Eyes etc.
MauriceWhiteReal User
We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitoring solutions were ExtraHop first, Riverbed SteelCenter second. Their negotiated cost is about the same but ExtraHop gives more features, has an excellent out of the box interface, and was the staff favorite after a proof of concept.
reviewer1434390 (User)Real User
PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it avoid the configuring the device in PRTG. It automatically discover the device and ip will get configured . Dashboard presentation in PRTG is very nice. Alarm , warnings ,logs and device running status etc can be displayed in there. Map view in the PRTG is very good feature which other similar product lacks. Network monitoring tool for SNMP is with in PRTG
Darryl TheronUser
In my opinion Infosim, StableNet Enterprise is the best as it is a third-generation highly automated network management system. It enables IT departments to unify the management requirements of their IT infrastructures in a way that enables the ‘true-visibility’ of the environment.
Being able to correlate Performance, Fault, and Configuration within a single unified application rapidly improves the Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) and increases the service uptime thus maintaining high levels of sustained service availability to your customers, and providing a great end-user experience.
StableNet® Enterprise is a highly flexible management system with a wealth of additional functional modules that fully complement industry best practices, i.e. ITILv3, SOX, PCI, NSA, etc. StableNet® Enterprise can be deployed on a multi-tenanted or dedicated platform and can be operated in a highly dynamic flex-compute environment.
Tjeerd SaijoenVendor
I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all kind of software in monitoring from infra to end to end, it depends on the functionality you require. For example do you need to monitor all switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers etc. And only the devices or traffic and response times as well. Do you need data from MIBS or only IP, UDP or other protocols. Do you need easy to install or can it be a little bit complicated. I prefer IBM Netcool it does not only equipment but almost everything including voice over IP. but t is not an easy install. If you like a easy install I recommend SolarWinds Network or BMC. Also you have a lot of freeware tools however I don't recommend this for enterprise environments.
Regards Tjeerd
Http://rufusai.com
Armando AlvarezUser
In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and agnostic environments, its scalability, and the concept of use of Zenpacks that they are completely programmable by the user.
reviewer1449024 (DevOps Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees)Real User
We are using for our FaultManagement for our networkdevices: Broadcom DX Spectrum (large enterprise)
| Rony_Sklar Community Manager at IT Central Station |
Why should businesses actively monitor network traffic?
What benefits are there to network monitoring?
Any suggestions for where to start with setting up effective network monitoring?
reviewer1122879 (IT Manager Network at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees)Real User
Start with an open-source no-cost solution like Nagios for Network Monitoring to get familiar with the features you like and don't like.
Benefits to network monitoring are the reduction in the meantime to recover and seamless experience to our customers.
Why should businesses monitor network traffic? Each business really needs to grasp its "why" on networking monitoring. Is it reactive and defensive or is it proactive with a roadmap leading to AIOps?
Raymond De RooijReal User
As already said Network monitoring is just one type of monitoring, and you should monitor on all levels to get a clear picture.
Hnad in hand with monitoring goes a good Event, Alert setup, to be warned when something is happening.
Now to Why?
- Network monitoring is to find the bottlenecks in your network, by looking at Bandwidth and latency.
- check on malfunctionign systems, by looking at Network errors
- find out between which points the most traffic is excahnged.
- you can look at trends, sudden peaks in traffic.
Benefits: Most benefit you will get is to prevent network disturbances. e.g when someone is hogging the internet connection you can quickly resolve it.
- it should also give an idea on where to invest on network equipment based on usage, bottlenecks etc.
- with respect to appliation performance, the network is normally the first thing that one is pointing at. so, it certainly helps to be able to see if the network is overused.
- insights will help wih e.g. QoS implementation, for voip, and business critical applications.
start setting up: I wuld also recommend to start with opensource, (also depend on the size of your network and its complexity).
Start with colelting standard in/out for the most important network components, like internet connection, routers, central switches.
Then based on some initial observations, you can define some alerts on when an connection (e.g. internet) is over used, e.g alarm at 60, 80, 90% capacity.
David CollierReseller
These are the 3 fundamental questions all businesses should answer before embarking on any monitoring project.
Let's start by saying that Network Monitoring is only 1 component of IT Monitoring. If you only monitor what is going on with the network itself you're driving with most of your car windows covered.
You also need to consider;
- Server Monitoring (hardware, OS)
- Application Monitoring (databases, AD, other middleware, web servers, application executables - the list goes on)
- Environmental Monitoring
- Security Monitoring
- End-user monitoring
Within these areas of monitoring, everything you monitor falls into one or more categories;
- Availability (is it working?)
- Performance (is it working fast enough?)
- Capacity (Have got enough of it?)
As a previous respondent has said, this also should be mapped to what the organization is using the IT for. i.e. what is the line of business systems that a company depends on to exist?
All these factors - the scope of monitoring and the categories of monitoring data when taken holistically, enable a business too;
1. Identify business-impacting events within the IT Infrastructure
2. Identify POTENTIALLY business-impacting events within the IT Infrastructure before they actually impact work.
3. Identify trends in an activity that can be indicative of changing business needs.
4. Identify where and when investment will need to be made to ensure that the business maintains operation (it's no use waiting until that disk drive is full before buying the upgrade - it's too late then).
5. Help to identify potential inadequacies in the IT Infrastructure (you do have a backup network route to your factory in Bolton don't you ?)
6. Identify potentially "rogue" devices on your network. Do you really want Alexa listening into the office activity?
7. Help to identify application improvements - how are people 'really' using your application? (I bet it's not the way that you expected !).
If you take these 7 capabilities that IT Monitoring provides and consolidate them into a single raison d'etre.....
A comprehensive monitoring solution encompassing the entire IT estate will enable an organization to save money by reducing the impact of IT issues. It will enable an organization to better plan the budget for IT investment. It will increase operational efficiency by reducing the number and duration of IT outages.
In a perfect world, IT Monitoring will pay for itself in terms of system availability, performance, and capacity. But it's not a perfect world.....
Only monitoring Network components only gives a network-centric view of any issue. Let's take a silly example..... Your router is reporting a massive increase in network traffic from one VLAN to another. The trend suggests that you're going to run out of capacity when the peak sales season hits. The problem though is that you've recently had an app upgrade that for some unknowne reason is doing full table scans of a 40GB table for each of your 300 users. Why fix the network when the application is at fault?
As for the final point - where to start?
As a previous respondent suggested, "start with an open-source no-cost solution....". That's probably a fair start. I would however consider all my points above first before launching into rounds of "yum install" or "tar -xvf". As far as possible, have an understanding of what your key business system are and how they plug together. Then identify the metrics that matter to the operation of that system. This is your foundation. For each metric consider why you need it, what you're going to do with it, how long to keep it for (that's the capacity side of monitoring) and what is the impact of it going wrong.
Now let me make something clear - and this is a personal perspective from a number of decades working in IT Monitoring - IT Monitoring Software is a mature market. It's a commoditised. Just about ALL monitoring software does fundamentally the same thing.
Large commercial vendors have a user base that's paying for support and upgrades as part of a maintenance contract. In order to maintain that revenue, these vendors introduce features and facilities that frankly very few customers actually exploit. Then the competition introduces the same features and maybe a few more and the whole cycle starts again - it's an example of the Red Queen Effect. The end result is that over time features are added that are of limited value or add to the underlying system requirements. I know of one platform that for a reasonably sized infrastructure needs around 12 - 20 servers just to do the monitoring (and that's excluding the proxies for remote monitoring).
Someone mentioned AIOPS. AI needs to learn in order to adapt. At the moment, AIOPS is MLOPS (Machine Learning Ops). The actual personnel and resource overhead in maintaining the additional components needed to make AI(ML)OPS a reality are beyond most companies - with the exception of very large telcos, service providers, and research agencies. For instance, AIOPS depends fundamentally on having a real-time dynamic view of the entire IT infrastructure and how everything is interconnected. Basically a CMS on steroids. As we enter the era of Docker containers, nebulous cloud services simply maintaining this view automatically is extremely difficult and resource-intensive.
Sure, IT Monitoring tools do network discovery and can identify new and changing environments but maintaining those dependencies is a complex process and I sincerely don't think that anyone vendor has 100% mastered it yet.
If you are a very large organization, with literally a million pounds to spend on IT Monitoring these large commercial solutions are the best. They're not perfect, not by a long chalk, but they are there. Factor in your running costs though.
Back to open-source. Open-source solutions such as Nagios and my personal favorite, Zabbix, are excellent at collecting data. And that is the fundamental, number one, priority. If you can't measure it, you can't monitor it.
My tips are, therefore:
1. Know what is important to your business.
2. Don't (please don't!!!) stick to monitoring networking devices.
3. Make sure you factor in the support and admin costs.
4. Don't forget to monitor user activity (known as Application Performance Management) as well as technical metrics such as CPU and Disk Space.
5. Start with the basics.
Hope that helps guide you.
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/itomdave
reviewer1122879 (IT Manager Network at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees)Real User
Why is network monitoring in Place?
Defensive monitoring is in place
because someone said we need but does not understand how it helps your business.
Proactive monitoring is when businesses mature to understand outages mean lost business lost customer satisfaction and lost opportunities then the why becomes apparent. Proactive AI Monitoring moving to predictive ML resolution is a strategic activity, Although not sexy.
Aji JosephReseller
Network monitoring proves clear visibility of your network thereby allowing you to act immediately in case of a network issue or bottleneck. You can easily identify network-related and security related issues that otherwise would take a lot of time in a network with more than 100 devices or more.
The first step would be to identify the devices and applications that you would like to cover under network monitoring. You can start with open source tools or solutions like PRTG or NetCrunch (cost-effective solutions).
JOHAN ROJASReal User
It is extremely important to be checking network traffic to detect possible failures such as bottlenecks, malfunctioning of a device on the network, or to detect any unusual increases in packets that could be some type of malware.
One of the biggest benefits is that you can see the performance of network traffic, Internet links, and the behavior of switches and routers.
It all starts with the most basic cabling that would be, having quality cabling, implemented in compliance with best practices, then making the network equipment settings according to the use to be made.
| Rony_Sklar Community Manager at IT Central Station |
What tools do you recommend for SQL server monitoring for an enterprise-level business?
DonaldBakelsReseller
I highly recommend 2 products from the SolarWinds ITOM Suite;
1 Server Application Monitor Check link: https://www.solarwinds.com/server-application-monitor
1 Database Performance Analyzer for SQLServer https://www.solarwinds.com/database-performance-analyzer-sql-server
Both products are integrated
Sergiy UstenkoUser
I use the Paessler (PRTG) for long time, and highly recommend one: https://www.paessler.com/database-monitoring
PieterVan BlommesteinReal User
It is a very easy answer. For sure OpsMgr(SCOM). The simple reason is, Microsoft developed OpsMgr(SCOM) to monitor Microsoft products and the best to do this. NO other monitoring toolset can do it as good as OpsMgr(SCOM). OpsMgr(SCOM) can do 3rd party monitoring as well.
Walter HarrisReal User
We have used Microsoft system center operations manager and it integrates well with SQL. We are starting to use open source tools and sending the metrics to Wavefront. This provides more real time monitoring but extensive development. The main issue we have in our environment with SCOM is real time ability.
Morne' O'KennedyReal User
I personally believe in SCOM (Operations Manager) since it contains all the required tools to monitor and manage SQL operationally. Majority of enterprises already have the Microsoft EA in place so the System Center licensing is already available along with SQL.
.. in summary
Ian Ian (Panopta)Vendor
I am 100% biased as I work for Panopta, but I wouldn't work here if I didn't think our monitoring tools weren't outstanding.
| Rony_Sklar Community Manager at IT Central Station |
What tools are best to use to monitor the quality of VoIP network for a mid-sized enterprise?
Brian PhilipsUser
This has evolved over time as unified communications has evolved. To really be accurate it should be done with a solution that uses packets as its data-source. This is really a not a good play for NetFlow or SNMP polling and traps. Some log companies will also throw their hat in this ring by collecting CDR {Call Data Records} from call manager servers on their opinion of the quality of the call by something called MOS {Mean Opinion Score}.
Each manufacturer/vendor will have some kind of tool to investigate at least the signalling {SIP, Skinny, etc} and maybe the signalling {RTP, etc} but that is also the constraint, many don't support other vendors. Most vendor-agnostic tools from NPM {Network Performance Managers} products can at least do Jitter and Out of Sequence and Packet Loss on the media {RTP} streams of a call, which network teams need to prove their innocence. Example vendors would be Riverbed, Extrahop, Viavi, NetScout. But these same vendors lack the Signalling correlation to the call. Then, today there is the SaaS aspect too. Like WEBEX, Zoom, 8x8, Teams, etc. and this traffic the media {RTP} is usually encrypted and often the signalling {SIP} is encrypted as well.
The only vendor I have tested and monitor as of today, right now, is NetScout. Their product is vendor agnostic, supports all versions of signalling and media, including video. Also, they have the ability to decrypt the HTTPS traffic going out to any SaaS vendor, even TLS 1.3. It even has the ability to "listen" to the calls and flag things like echo, tinny like sounds, soft voice, loud voice, background noise, and correlate to factors like QoS mapping, Jitter, Loss, OOS, etc. It also monitors and alerts on One Way Calls, DTMF mistakes, Voice Mail, Conference Call stitching, Call forwarding following, path latency and network error hop by hop. A very long list of other features. They even know what each CODEC can tolerate in the aspect of network errors and call quality as far as sound goes. This means if the CODEC can absorb the issues it will log and baseline the behavior but not Alarm on it unless you want it too.
The last point I will make is really about privacy laws worldwide. Replayability in any investigation only or investigation & monitoring solution has to be tightly controlled and logged and if that is not possible then do not save the packet payload on the media.
reviewer775476 (Network Engineer at a government with 51-200 employees)Real User
You can use the IP SLA feature running on Cisco routers. As so, you can define many protocols to monitoring. You have to confogure a router as IP SLA sender and many routers or devices as IP SLA responders. Depending of the feautures of the responders, you can see ICMP, UDP, TCP responders. If you have VoIP responders, you can monitor also the jitters and the MOS values.
All of this results are loaded in the IP SLA sender router. The you can see theses statistics (history, graphs) with monitoring tools, as PRTG or WUG. Are you working with Cisco devices? If yes, this is a great and powerful way.
Chetan WoodunReal User
I have seen Nagios, PRTG and ManageEngine
These are all appropriate tools. Just adding my own experience as having the opportunity to have worked with all.
Nagios , easy to implement, agents easy to install, interface management for alerts: good
PRTG , easy to implement, agents very easy to install, interface management for alerts: good
ManageEngine is more modular to implement, agents easy to install, interface management for alerts: very good
IdanLererReal User
Using LogicMonitor, you can monitor network equipment and servers, I think this depends on your equipment,
Sandra GlaserUser
Nagios XI is the commercial, easier-to-use version of the Nagios core open source version, but still has the extensibility of core. Tends to be very price competitive too.
Mohamed Y AhmedReseller
PRTG is the best that I have used ever, Check its sensors and If you didn't find the sensor that you are looking for you can create your own one meanwhile you can request it from the development team.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: June 2021.
511,773 professionals have used our research since 2012.
We’ve switched from Solarwinds to Centreon even before the issue occurred. It’s way cheaper and is a good alternative and very flexible to your needs. You can play with it yourself.
Thousand Eyes acquired by Cisco, interesting synergies with AppDynamics APM.
Riverbed is also a great solution very easy to install and a great dashboard.
I have used both and have to say my experience with Connectwise was very good. Design for MSP's and when used with IT Glue and My It Process nice, accurate seamless.
We, at MapleLabs have developed best-of-the breed APM & Log mgmt. product SnappyFlow (https://www.snappyflow.io/#/). SnappyFlow is a unique APM & Log Monitoring application that brings together metrics, logs, tracing & synthetic monitoring in an elegant workflow and unified view. We work with SaaS companies having Cloud native applications that are micro services based, dispersed across VMs, Kubernetes & Cloud Services and straddle hybrid Clouds. SnappyFlow is best suited to optimize your cloud native apps, maximize the performance and availability of your cloud infrastructure. SnappyFlow is currently listed in AWS and vCenter marketplace and very cost-effective, scalable and flexible solution compared to its peers, including Cloudwatch. We're offering extended free trials till the time you're comfortable with the product. Please give it a thought. Thanks!
Please check out InfraonIMS from EverestIMS Technologies.
(https://www.everestims.com/inf...)
The major advantage is an integrated solution which not only monitors the complete IT Infra but also provides complete visibility into the ticket lifecycle for any issues detected via the PINK-Certified InfraonDesk ITSM engine.
From a security standpoint, the tool is OWASP Certified for higher levels of protection against malicious attacks.
The hackers targeted SolarWinds because SolarWinds has many customers. To minimize the risk of being hacked through one of your vendors, this suggests choosing unpopular vendors with few customers. Which is completely irrational.
Summary - this is a really hard problem and switching vendors does nothing to reduce your risk of this type of hack.
IBM Netcool is a great alterative, also available as a SaaS solution from https://rufusai.com