Network monitoring tools and software are essential in this world of networking and advancements. These tools’ primary duties are to monitor, detect, diagnose network issues, optimize network performance, and provide network availability. Devices such as routers, servers, firewalls, virtual machines, and switches are integrated with these monitoring tools through various protocols and routers can be managed by network guides by routerlogin.app. Since the number of monitoring software and tools is increasing day by day, you may confuse choosing the right tool. So, here is a list of the top five best network monitoring software and tools.
Network Monitoring is the new weapon every connected organization should have in its arsenal. However, the vast array of tools and softwares available makes choosing into a daunting task. Luckily for you, we have checked out all of the best network monitoring tools for 2021 and brought this review for you.
For those of you who don’t know, Network marketing is a very critical IT procedure, and it allows you to be notified about your network’s performance at all times. In this process, you constantly monitor and optimize your routers, VMs, switches, servers, and firewalls.
A comprehensive network monitoring tool will provide you with a clear image of what you should do to make sure all your devices are available whenever you need them. Getting a tool that performs real-time monitoring for you helps you to identify the bottlenecks for the overall productivity in the system.
1. Solarwinds network performance monitor
Price: The price starts from $2995, and for more pricing details, you can get a quote.
Best suited: small, medium, and large businesses.
It is one of the top network monitoring tools with a diverse set of features. You can easily monitor the availability and performance of all the connected devices. It facilitates sending notifications via email or SMS when there is an alert condition. It also enables rotating between Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to packet analysis smoothly and gives you control over the monitoring network segment.
The SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is an amazing monitoring tool that gives you a comprehensive overview of your network. It provides you with a holistic perspective for all your devices and network. You can see the performance of all your connected network devices on the dashboard at any point in time.
This allows you to determine the quality of infrastructure links by viewing all the devices, applications, and services on your topology map. You can immediately diagnose the region of the network issues with the help of the NetPath feature that traces every packet transfer.
Pros:
- Health and performance of the system can be viewed on the dashboard.
- Creates reports by collecting performance statistics between time intervals and also data centers.
- Has excellent UI design and native VMware support.
- Features customizable and automated network mapping.
- Customize trigger conditions for various alerts
- All Active Alerts page allows you to monitor all the alerts
- Allows you to rotate between SNMP monitoring and packet analysis easily
- Thirty-day free trial period.
Cons:
- Quite difficult to get additional details of the alerts.
- Doesn’t support all the devices.
- Removing and acknowledging node warning should be more intuitive
- Configuration of interfaces between nodes can be improved.
2. Datadog Network Performance Monitoring
Price: The cost varies depending on the plan. It costs $15/host per month in Pro and $23/host in Enterprise plan per month for the SaaS edition. The tool is free for up to five hosts. The pricing per month for Infrastructure is $15/host and APM is $31/host. The cost for Log Management is $1.27 per million log events.
Best suited: small, medium, and large businesses.
In this software, the network monitoring is done through cloud-based SaaS infrastructure and SNMP for live statistics. With this tool’s help, you can easily monitor and spot the added, removed, or moved resources from the network. It also features a log consolidator to track down and interpret the system log records.
An additional feature is live utilization visualizations, which easily help you identify the overloaded links and inefficient cabling. You achieve Datadog Network Performance Monitoring using a cloud-based SaaS infrastructure monitoring service. It is designed for a hybrid cloud environment and works as a great monitoring service. You can easily monitor apps, tools, services, and networks.
With this service, you can check the performance of your network from the saved statistics on the SaaS Datadog system. It offers great extensibility with different APIs with incredible documentation. This tool is available for upto five hosts in a free version, but the Pro version costs $15/per host per month while Enterprise costs around $23 /per host per month.
Pros:
- Facilitates auto-discovery features with the help of SNMP-based monitoring.
- Suitable for all network sizes and topography due to its scalable and cloud-based service.
- Managing resource downtime and looking into metrics history is easier.
- Lightweight agents on hosts and dashboards are easily modifiable.
- Cloud-based service suitable with all kinds of servers and databases.
- Gives you instant email and notification alerts if the database goes down.
- Can create custom screen boards for better monitoring
- Easy to access metrics history
- Managing becomes cakewalk
Cons:
- Quite difficult to understand the navigation to new areas.
- Finding the metric or dashboard is quite tricky for the new users.
- Difficult to remove resources from Datadog
3. ManageEngine OPManager
Price: The cost ranges from $245 to $11,545, depending on the number of devices.
Best suited: small, medium, and large businesses.
The tool also uses SNMP monitoring to easily monitor the availability and performance of all the connected devices. It facilitates sending notifications via email or SMS when there is an alert condition. It also provides an automatic discovery and map feature for network mapping.
If pre-configured network monitor device templates hit the sweet spot for you as a network engineer, then this network monitoring solution is meant for you. It allows you to monitor everything you want to see with a two-view dashboard. The current users consider it to be a well-balanced solution when it comes to network monitoring and analysis.
ManageEngine OpManager is basically a network monitoring, infrastructure management, and APM software. It can effortlessly manage your server, network, routers, fault, configuration, and performance. You can purchase the essential product edition for $595 that allows you to connect up to 25 devices.
Pros:
- Features customizable dashboard.
- Easy to understand and use.
- Monthly report on region-wise bandwidth can be calculated.
- Features baseline threshold calculation and packet capture analysis.
- Network mapping and Automatic discovery
- SNMP monitoring
- Email and SMS alerts allow users to react fastly
- Can proactively monitor and manage the environment
Cons:
- Lacks sensor for Azure or AWS metrics.
- Need to work on the dashboard, settings, and topology maps that take a long time.
- Dashboards can be more flexible and user-friendly
4. Site24x7
Price: The cost for infrastructure (cloud, server, and network) is $9/month when paid annually. The All-in-one package has four editions: Pro, $35; Classic, $89; Elite, $225; and Enterprise, $449. The above four packages are mentioned per month when paid annually. Similarly, there are different costs for website monitoring, APM, and MSP.
Best suited: small, medium, and large businesses and software development and IT operations (DevOps).
This tool works based on cloud-based networks to monitor the networks’ performance and availability, user behavior, and IT infrastructure. It also features an automatic network topology mapper to create maps using the available device inventory data. This tool uses SNMP to send a notification in times of critical situations. This notification is sent as an alert on the dashboard.
When you say you want a good network monitoring tool, won’t you prefer the one that gives you 24*7 intricate analysis of your network? If your answer is yes, then Site24x7 is your perfect potion. It automatically discovers all the connected devices of the network. You can draw network topology maps by searching the results from its compiled equipment inventory.
The SNMP drives the auto-discovery feature for Site24x7. Whenever it identifies a performance issue, it sends an alert or warning to the dashboard labeled with the issue’s severity. Other than this, Site24x7 helps you to monitor switches, cloud services, routers, power supplies, load balancers, firewall appliances, wireless networks, and WAN connections. It isn’t a bandwidth traffic monitor but works great when it comes to covering the basics of network monitoring.
Pros:
- All-in-one solution for network discovery and monitoring.
- Easy to use and lightweight agent on devices.
- Easy to organize different servers under groups.
- Easy to navigate web console and accurate.
- Reliable tool for uptime monitoring
- User-friendly
- Easy integration
- Great precision and accuracy
Cons:
- Setting time for monitoring and maintenance takes a long time.
- Does not monitor bandwidth traffic.
- Doesn’t provide credential management
5. PRTG Network Monitor
Price: The cost varies depending on the license size. It is free up to 100 sensors, and the price ranges from $1600 to $60000 depending on the plan.
Best suited: small, medium, and large businesses.
Paessler offers this tool with various sensors such as VOIP and QoS sensors, SNMP sensors, Bandwidth Monitoring sensors, and many more. This tool uses SNMP, Packet Sniffing, and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to monitor the network’s performance and availability. It facilitates sending notifications via email or SMS when there is a breach in the bandwidth threshold.
Pros:
- Features customizable dashboard.
- Monitors servers, CPU, Memory, Disk, network, bandwidth, and port up/down.
- Easy to use and understand the UI.
- Provides a report on sensor history and uptime stats.
- The threshold for each sensor can be chosen, and the sensors are accurate.
Cons:
- Sometimes SNMP error does not point in the right direction.
- Quite complicated to set up and change the web pages or maps.
6. Nagios Core
Price: $2,495 USD per year
Nagios Core has got it all in one place with its web interface for easy monitoring. We find it impressive that this tool enables you to keep a check over everything you need within a single page. You can monitor current network status, host status totals, and network service by glancing over different areas of your screen.
It has a color-coded GUI to help you identify compromised elements in your network in a flash. You can track every element’s performance in your network and get alerts whenever any issue is identified. There is an option to integrate your other network services or check any of the community plug-ins available on Nagios exchange to get access to additional features.
Pros:
- User-friendly GUI
- Fast alerts through emails
- Easy configuration
Cons:
- Little difficult to install plug-ins
Conclusion
We are no geniuses when it comes to choosing the best networking monitoring solution, but we hope we’ve made the selection job easier for you. When you’ve chosen a tool and installed it, try to stick with it for a long time. Mastering a tool and its functions help you gain amazing results, so don’t wait and get the best monitoring tool for you now!
As an organization, you know, making use of the best network monitoring tool will ensure network performance and health, which has a significant impact on the business’s performance, productivity, and security. Make a wise choice and get the best.