The foundation of any successful business is utilizing the most modern technologies for everyday tasks. Today you can’t run a company, no matter how big or small, with just phones and faxes anymore. You will need a wide network of servers, devices, and applications, even if your company is not involved in software development.
Your company IT infrastructure may be physical or cloud-based, but in any case it has to run smoothly to facilitate employees’ performance instead of hindering it. It is a well-known truth that any problem is easier to fix if you notice it as early as possible, before it becomes aggravated. That is why system, network and infrastructure performance monitoring is so important.
When you have an opportunity to gather all the important metrics on your network and devices, you can notice something is wrong very quickly and fix it before your employees or customers can feel the network performance plummet. There are so many different monitoring tools though, that choosing the one with the best monitoring capabilities can be daunting. But does it have to also be expensive? Definitely not, if you decide to go with open-source monitoring tools. We have compiled a list of the most popular options to make the choice even easier for you.
Monitoring tools
Although you can often see popular monitoring solutions that, besides everything else, offer the opportunity to monitor network traffic and network bandwidth usage referred to as network monitoring tools, most of them actually allow you to monitor not just the network itself, but also your servers and applications, etc. The exact list of features differs for each monitoring tool. We will describe some of the most widely-used network monitoring tools with free open-source versions in more detail here.
If you want to learn more about our approach to monitoring, see our end-to-end monitoring solutions.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a monitoring solution that offers network and server monitoring together with application and service monitoring. In short, you can use it to monitor your entire physical server and/or cloud infrastructure. It is a versatile monitoring solution that can be used for monitoring network devices even on a data center level, thanks to its scalability and automation capabilities.
Zabbix is a flexible monitoring tool that has multiple options for metrics collection and data processing. You can conveniently visualize and analyze multiple streams of data, for example, the performance data that is gathered from the monitoring network. Furthermore, monitoring distributed systems is easier with Zabbix, thanks to its centralized web interface.
Another advantage of Zabbix is its integration with multiple popular ticketing and alerting systems, not to mention ITSM and IoT integration capabilities. You can use Zabbix together with Jira, Oracle, Jenkins, and NGINX, just to name a few.
Although Zabbix offers a free version, if you want to receive professional support, you will need to purchase a paid subscription. However, it does also boast an active community, so you can look for answers on the forum boards dedicated to this open-source monitoring tool.
One thing about Zabbix that you need to keep in mind, though, is that this software is rather complicated. Zabbix offers great monitoring and analysis capabilities but also has a steep learning curve, so if this is the first open-source monitoring tool you are about to use, you will need to set aside some time for mastering its user interface and multiple features.
Nagios
One of the oldest monitoring software solutions that is still popular today is Nagios. This monitoring solution can keep an eye on your entire IT infrastructure and offers several different versions, including the completely free Nagios Core.
With Nagios you can monitor all your infrastructure components, including operating systems, applications, services, multiple network protocols, and systems metrics. Nagios will help you track problems that occur because of overloaded network connections or data links, watch over the state of network devices, check network latency and gather a rich set of other network metrics, plus generate graphs to visualize the collected data.
In regards to server monitoring, Nagios offers both agentless and agent-based monitoring for Unix and Windows servers. Monitoring servers becomes even easier when you consider there are more than 5,000 various add-ons for Nagios.
Furthermore, Nagios provides tools for application monitoring that make it easier to track an application’s state and ensure uptime. And all of your log data is stored conveniently on the Nagios log server, facilitating setting up notifications and alerts or searching for the necessary logs.
Although some of the more advanced features, like network traffic analysis, are only available in the paid version, Nagios remains a popular open-source monitoring software. Among its 9,000+ customers are such giants as Cisco, PayPal, and Airbnb.
Icinga
The Nagios team created a separate free tool, Icinga, with more advanced network monitoring capabilities. This tool focuses on making your first steps into the monitoring world as simple as possible. Icinga is much easier to learn to use than most monitoring tools, it offers a better user interface than Nagios, includes multiple templates, and supports hundreds of vendor integrations, including, for example, Cisco and HP.
With Icinga it is easy to identify the exact cause of a specific problem thanks to complete visibility across the infrastructure of your network. You can monitor network availability, discover trends and collect system performance metrics.
The tool alerts are customizable, but Icinga enables users to get useful insights even with the default setup. You can use it for monitoring both physical infrastructure and highly distributed scalable systems in the cloud. Strong community support, not limited to traditional forums, is another advantage that makes it a good choice for smaller or mid-size companies.
Prometheus
The second project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, after Kubernetes, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution that offers great metrics analysis and multiple customization opportunities.
There are a number of native libraries that allow the use of Prometheus with such popular runtimes and programming languages as Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, and others. And thanks to multiple existing exporters you can bridge the data from third-party tools such as HAProxy, Docker, or StatsD metrics or network statistics into Prometheus too.
Prometheus differs from other monitoring tools because of a unique multidimensional data model where metrics are identified by names and labels. Prometheus allows you to control data aggregation across these labels and visualize it using a native querying language, called PromQL. The system analyzes the data and allows you to configure flexible alerts based on it.
Although designed for monitoring, this open-source tool also makes it easy to store all your data from multiple servers or multiple devices for as long as you need. And data queries use very few resources, which is another distinguishing feature of Prometheus.
Although Prometheus offers its own web interface, it is also widely used together with Grafana, which enhances its data collection and data visualization capabilities. Grafana dashboards can serve as a centralized system for Prometheus metrics visualization, analysis, and alerts setup.
All the complex functionality available in Prometheus, with its customization opportunities and flexible alerting system, means that it might take longer to learn how to use it effectively. It can be helpful to source paid support or training from expert third parties, in addition to the usual community support that is available free of charge.
Checkmk
Another robust IT monitoring tool, Checkmk, is well-known for its scalability and automation capabilities. Its high-performance core facilitates horizontal scaling of up to millions of services and hundreds of thousands of hosts without drastically increasing the digital footprint.
Checkmk isn’t just a platform that features infrastructure monitoring capabilities, it facilitates the work of your monitoring team by automating a lot of processes that typically might require manual effort. You can, for example, use REST API for automatic configuration and enjoy the advantages of automated agent management and auto-discovery.
There are more than 2,000 plugins in the Checkmk library for monitoring any complex hybrid infrastructure with multiple connected devices. Besides excellent monitoring capabilities, Checkmk also offers such security features as two-factor authentication, encryption, and granular access control.
Checkmk Raw Edition is a free tool, but you can also choose the paid Enterprise or Cloud Editions if you need more advanced features or paid support for distributed monitoring of your cloud or hybrid environment, especially if you need monitoring services on a large scale.
Cacti
Monitoring capabilities are just a part of what the Cacti framework can provide. This is a fully-fledged network graphing solution based on the RRD Tool’s data classification. RRDTool, where RRD stands for Round-Robin Database, is the open-source industry standard of a high-performance system for time-series data logging and graphing.
Cacti offers a wide range of features, including advanced automation opportunities, a fully distributed framework for data collection with fault tolerance, various methods for data acquisition, and so on. Since Cacti allows you to create custom scripts for data gathering and also offers network polling capabilities, you can utilize it for collecting data on connected devices in networks of any scope.
Still, if you want to enjoy all the advantages Cacti’s wide range of customization possibilities brings, you need to have some pretty advanced skills. Cacti might be overkill if your network doesn’t have any special characteristics that standard monitoring tools can’t cover, and it might seem intimidating when no one on your team has the experience required to set it up. If you have the technical expertise that Cacti requires though, you will enjoy great control over the network monitoring services that it provides.
Graphite
Originally designed as a side project at Orbitz, Graphite is a monitoring tool that works equally well in the cloud or on cheaper physical IT infrastructure, so it is a popular choice for companies of all sizes. This solution is typically used for monitoring the performance of servers, applications, and websites.
With Graphite it is possible to gather and visualize multiple numerical time series data points or performance indicators like I/O metrics, CPU, SSDs, and others, from any number of servers in your network.
Since Graphite doesn’t offer any specific monitoring capabilities besides storing time series data and rendering data graphs on demand, it might be one of the more easily-managed monitoring solutions available. It offers a number of integrations, one of the most popular of which is with Grafana, for enhanced metrics analysis functionality.
Observium
Another widely used network management and monitoring platform, Observium, has several different versions, including the free Observium Community. With Observium you can not only watch over the network performance and health in real time, but also facilitate capacity and disaster recovery planning using the long-term collection and analysis of network metrics.
Observium also gives you the opportunity to take care of potential issues proactively so that you can solve problems before they begin to impact your network service. Automatic network services and devices discovery improves your IT infrastructure visibility.
A user-friendly interface makes Observium a monitoring tool that doesn’t require vast technical expertise to configure and use. It has been adopted by multiple enterprises such as eBay, Spotify, and Twitch.
Netdata
Widely considered as one of the most advanced monitoring tools, Netdata is another project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This monitoring tool allows you to gather network data in real time, gain insights from visualizing the collected metrics, and use the data for troubleshooting.
With Netdata, you don’t need to understand the meaning of each metric in depth, so it is not necessary to spend a lot of time on configuration. A straightforward user interface makes it easy to focus on analyzing the visualized data and proactively resolving potential issues.
Netdata’s architecture is powered by machine learning which facilitates quicker issues discovery and alerts triggering. Moreover, it is famous for its scalability in any environment, be it physical IT infrastructure, IoT devices, containers, or the cloud.
It is easy to extend Netdata’s functionality too, thanks to its integrations not only with other popular monitoring tools like Graphite or Prometheus, but also commercial solutions from third-party vendors.
Why choose open-source tools for monitoring
The choice between a free open-source solution and paid software might seem to be extremely easy. However, there are certain concerns that can often stop you from going with open-source tools for monitoring your company network. The main fear is usually security – you might wonder if using that particular solution could cause more problems than it solves.
Another important concern is support. Very often learning to use the functionality of complex monitoring tools takes a long time, and the open-source community might not always be as helpful as you need. Your business might suffer if you have to wait for a reply on a forum board for days or even weeks. And hiring a skilled specialist just to manage the monitoring tool might defeat the purpose of choosing a free solution in the first place.
These concerns are valid, however, if you choose and plan carefully, you will be able to enjoy the benefits of open-source solutions for network monitoring while mitigating the potential risks. Monitoring tools developed by a group of professionals that offer both a paid and a free version are typically regularly updated, so even the free version will be up to security standards. Most importantly, when you choose one of the popular open-source solutions we have listed in this article, you get a wide range of features and integration capabilities, which means you have the freedom to monitor exactly what you need when and how you need it.
If you are wondering how the security in cloud apps is, check out our previous article.
Summary
Network monitoring tools are a must since even the best network devices from popular vendors might fail sometimes. Being able to quickly notice and fix network issues to prevent any downtime can save your company a lot of money. Using an open-source monitoring tool can not only be cost-effective but also ensure you get the specific functionality you need for your own network monitoring purposes.
