Network monitoring tools capture the availability of the IT infrastructure components. These tools monitor and collate the availability and resource utilitzation metrics of servers, networks, database instances and storage. The best tools perform real time and historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor. There are paid and opensource tools available and here are a few of the top choices for 2021.
IsITUp Network Monitor
ItsItUp can monitor your Windows Event Logs on both your local and remote systems. Most Windows subsystems and many applications use the Event Log as the primary place to communicate information about their status and operations. System administrators must constantly review a large number of Event Logs on a daily basis. IsItUp relieves this burden by reviewing the Event Logs and alerting system administrators when an event occurs that meets preselected criteria. This makes IsItUp a flexible tool for maintaining your systems health and security.
Pros – Inexpensive and simple to configure. Has the capability to monitor IP Devices, File, Print, and Application Servers, HTTP Servers, Email Servers, Tcp /Ip Ports, Windows Services, SNMP, DNS, Windows Event Logs, CPU Utilization, Memory Utilization and Bandwidth.
Cons – IsItUp only detects dependency loops when a device is actually being tested
MeshCentral
Connect to your devices from anywhere in the world using this open source, remote monitoring and management server. Once installed, each enabled computer will show up in the “My Devices” section of the web site and will be able to perform remote desktop, remote terminal, file transfers and more. You can install your own server on Linux or Windows, it will run on anything from a large cloud instance to a Raspberry Pi.
Pros – Price (free) and performance. Drop this on a small cloud Linux VM and rule the world. Works for both Windows and Linux without incident. It is agent based, so that firewalls are typically not an issue.
Cons – Search functionality could be improved.
Zabbix
Zabbix is used as a primary monitoring tool that has intelligent alerting to detect a problem and remediate it, automated collection of metrics help to reduce many efforts in managing your system.
Pros – Its totally free with features very similar to costly solutions.
Cons – It can be difficult to manage and configure. It does not provide MFA and is hard to integrate with third-party tools such as Slack.
PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG is a great agentless network monitoring solution for visibility and status of your network infrastructure and Initial setup is simple. It can monitor every disk, memory, logs, and any connected devices in the network. It has its own working environment, its own database, so while collecting data, it will not put much burden on the network which is being monitored.
Pros – quick to deploy and easy to manage solution that allows IT to receive notifications for all the common infrastructure related areas of concern. Active and real-time alerting system triggers alert and email notification when any device or service goes offline.
Cons – the GUI is not very appealing and is cumbersome to customize. The PRTG network map, not very user friendly to setup.
