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Top Network Monitoring Tools and Software for 2020

February 11, 2020

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In order to compete in an ever-changing marketplace of network and server monitoring, new software, tools, and utilities are being launched almost every year. Whether you’re setting up a network, diagnosing an anomaly, or just monitoring an environment, your set of networking tools as well as your software should be complete, robust, and reliable. Below you will find a list of some of the best network monitoring tools and software to use in 2020.

Top Network Monitoring Tools That Cost Nothing

As enterprise networks are becoming more and more complex, it is increasingly important to put network monitoring and managing solutions in place early in the implementation phase. If you do decide to go the free/open-source route, you should know that using open-source monitoring requires a high level of involvement with the tool. 

Nagios Core is a free network monitoring tool designed as the basis for other monitoring and alerting software offered by the company. This powerful network monitoring tool helps you ensure that your critical systems, applications, and services are always up and running. It features several APIs that are used to extend its capabilities to perform additional tasks, is implemented as a daemon written in C for performance reasons and is designed to run natively on Linux/Unix systems.

Zabbix is probably the most widely used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios. It comes with a simple and clean GUI that makes it easy to manage, once you get the hang of it. It is free for commercial and non-commercial use and there are no limitations on the number of monitored devices. It supports many databases, including IBM Db2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite. Its monitoring capabilities allow for customization using any scripting or programming language, which is widely regarded as its best feature.

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool that allows you to collect data from almost any network element, routing and switching systems as well as firewalls, and putting that data into robust graphs. This networking tool provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with thousands of devices. 

Icinga is a monitoring system which checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Icinga 2 can be used to monitor the availability of hosts and services. Hosts and services can be virtually anything that can be checked in some way: network services (HTTP, SMTP, SNMP, SSH etc.), printers, switches or routers, temperature sensors, other local or network-accessible services.

Best Network Monitoring Tools for Every Budget 

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is an easy-to-set-up solution that scales and expands with the needs of your network. Its simple approach to oversee an entire network makes it one of the most intuitive user interfaces. Solarwinds NPM has an extensive feature list, including automatic network discovery and scanning for wired and WiFi computers and devices, forecast and capacity planning, easy to use performance dashboard, hop-by-hop analysis of critical network paths and components. 

One of the best choices for organizations with low experience in network monitoring, PRTG Network Monitor features a user interface that is extremely powerful and very user-friendly. PRTG monitors IT infrastructure using technology such as SNMP, WMI, SSH, Flows/Packet Sniffing, HTTP requests, REST APIs, Pings and SQL. A very particular feature of PRTG is its ability to monitor devices in the datacenter using a mobile app.

ManageEngine OpManager is an easy-to-use and affordable network monitoring solution, containing pre-defined monitoring parameters and intervals for specific device types. It monitors network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, VMs, printers, storage devices, as well as everything that has an IP and is connected to the network. OpManager also provides integrated troubleshooting capabilities with planning and configuration management.

Site24x7 offers cloud monitoring for devOps and IT operations with monitoring capabilities extending to analyzing the experience of real users accessing websites and applications from desktop and mobile devices. This tool allows IT professionals to comprehensively monitor critical network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, wireless, load balancers, WAN accelerators, printers, UPS, and storage.

Choosing the right network monitoring tool for your enterprise might not be such an easy task. Decision-makers need to consider several key factors such as compatibility, security, ease of use, and budget. Paid tech solutions are typically viewed as expensive, but there are several free and open-source network monitoring tools that your business should consider when choosing one.