Top 10 Best Network Monitoring Software Tools

The network monitoring tools used to monitor the entire network devices and services constantly and it notifies the Network Administrators if any network devices or services effected (any Node or Links down and services affected with high utilization).

Now most of the organizations from the smallest office to the largest enterprises looking for some kind of network monitoring tools to help them analyze performance issues, alert them to threats, and provide reports on the health of the network environment. For any organization it is highly crucial to invest on Network Monitoring Tools. This below list comprises of some free and some paid but all desirable Network monitoring tools, you can find customized  package or an open source code tool as per your requirements.

Cacti

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti 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 hundreds of devices.

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PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG monitors system availability using a variety of methods from simple ping through SNMP and WMI protocols to specific tasks such as HTTP, DNS, and Remote Desktop availability using various sensors. Using specific sensors for specific machines, an administrator can monitor service availability–including Exchange and SQL–and be notified instantly of problems. Also, PRTG comes with some bandwidth monitoring sensors, so you can ensure that malware designed to do DoS, “phone home”, and other overload activities are not operating on your network.

PRTG supports all Windows versions, XP/2003 or later.

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Nagios

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. Nagios XI extends on proven, enterprise-class Open Source components to deliver the best monitoring solution for today’s demanding organizational requirements. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better. Some of its many features include monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, etc.), monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.), and contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method).

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Orion Network Performance Monitor

Orion Network Performance Monitor is the ticket for large, complex network environments. Stand-out features are the Web interface, an integrated Wireless Poller to monitor wireless devices, and easily customizable reports.

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Colasoft packet graphing

Colasoft software includes a Diagnosis console that lists events separated by OSI layers and enables sorting by severity, source address or event type to help speed recovery. A special Matrix view is available, too, that depicts connections at-a-glance, further enhancing diagnosis.

Supported operating systems are Windows-only: Windows XP (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows 2008 (32- and 64-bit versions) and Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit versions).
Update: Capsa 7.2.1 no longer supports Windows 2000.

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Munin

Munin is an open source application that enables the administrator to monitor and collect data for networks, PCs, SANS, and even applications. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

Munin is available for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems including: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, OS X / Darwin supported in trunk, and HP-UX.

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Zenoss

Zenoss provides insight and unified operations for large-scale physical, virtual and cloud-based IT environments. Zenoss is available for a number of operating systems. You can install packages built for most flavours of Linux and Mac OS X, or build it from source on any other system where there are no packages pre-built. Also available are virtual appliances for VMware.

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Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution that has Advanced cache module for much better performance.

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collectd

collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning).

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Observium

Observium is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux networks but includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems.

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Argus

Argus is a system and network monitoring application. Argus is a fixed-model Real Time Flow Monitor designed to track and report on the status and performance of all network transactions seen in a data network traffic stream. It will monitor nearly any applications like TCP + UDP applications, IP connectivity, SNMP OIDS, Programs, Databases, etc. Argus provides a common data format for reporting flow metrics such as connectivity, capacity, demand, loss, delay, and jitter on a per transaction basis. The record format that Argus uses is flexible and extensible, supporting generic flow identifiers and metrics, as well as application/protocol specific information.

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Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization.

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Monit

Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

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Splunk

Splunk allows you to index, search, alert, and report on both live and archived IT data. Splunk is a modular Web-based tool that allows you to add or subtract apps to match your needs. There are both free and enterprise versions available for Windows, Linux, Mac, AIX, Solaris, and BSD.

Splunk collects data from multiple sources on your network and analyzes that data in one, centralized, Web-based location.

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LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor allows you to add an agent to a machine and have it monitored from your own, personalized dashboard that can be reached from anywhere using a web browser. It will keep you apprised of the status of your network, network equipment, cloud, databases, applications, power infrastructure, and more.

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