Businesses and organizations rely on large numbers of servers, both in the cloud and on-premise, to run smoothly to ensure that their services remain productive and reliable. Poor performance, or even worse, server downtime, can have huge repercussions, impacting company revenue, customer service, and reputation. This means that close monitoring of server performance is vital.
What Do Server Monitoring Tools Do?
Server monitoring software is used to continuously monitor, track, and analyze the performance of your server infrastructure. These tools monitor elements such as CPU usage, RAM utilization, memory allocation, network links, and disk space. Such monitoring helps to identify performance issues early, enabling their swift resolution. Tracking server performance in real-time enables you to generate capacity forecasts, helping to inform capacity planning decisions.
Choosing the right server monitoring tool for your business or organization can prove difficult. In this article, we have compiled a list of the top 10 server monitoring tools on the market to help make this choice easier for you.
What Are the Top 10 Server Monitoring Tools?
1. Paessler PRTG
PRTG is an agentless monitoring tool and dashboard that is designed to probe servers, switches, routers, and more. It has been available since 2003. PRTG is a highly tuned application commonly used to monitor network appliances for throughput and uptime. One major advantage of PRTG is its discovery mode feature, which scans a pre-defined network range and automatically adds new devices as soon as they join the network, a perfect solution for remote monitoring at scale.
2. Nagios
Nagios is an agentless monitoring solution that is available in both a free core version and a paid offering called Nagios XI. Nagios is a popular solution and has great compatibility with Linux, VMware, and networking appliances. It can monitor host resources such as CPU, Disk, and Memory and can also probe hardware such as temperature sensors, alarms, etc. Alerts can be received by push notification, email, and SMS, and it offers great customizable options that can be modified extensively using shell scripts, C++, Python, and more.
3. WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold is another monitoring tool that has been around since the early 2000s. It has changed significantly since its first revisions that created HTTP dashboards displaying the status of nodes. Traditionally a data center-based application, newer revisions have full cloud integration, dashboards, and alerts. Automated device discovery, network mapping, and real-time alerting are popular features of WhatsUp Gold.
4. Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool for networks, servers, cloud, and virtual infrastructure. Zabbix is primarily an agent-based platform, but agentless monitoring using SNMP, TCP, and ICMP are available. However, it is the agent that shines for Zabbix. Zabbix is available as a virtual application and lightweight Docker container. Key features include auto-discovery and agents for pretty much any operating system (including out-of-support OSes like Windows 2000). The open-source community releases 3 feature updates per year, resulting in many new features and services.
5. OpenNMS
OpenNMS is a comprehensive, 100% open-source server monitoring tool designed for flexibility and scalability. Despite being available for free, OpenNMS boasts numerous features that set it apart from its competitors, including event-driven architecture, network traffic analysis, performance metric management, and topology discovery and mapping. With its user-friendly interface and the availability of an iPhone mobile app, OpenNMS allows customers to monitor the status of their network wherever they are.
6. Spiceworks Network Monitor
Another free server monitoring option, Spiceworks is a simplified tool that allows customers to access real-time information on the health of their servers. Customers can benefit from free support, easy deployment, real-time insights, a dynamic dashboard, flexibility and scalability, and the introduction of real-time email alerts in the near future.
7. Sematext Monitoring
Sematext Monitoring offers performance monitoring for both on-premise and cloud environments. Hosted in the cloud, it provides real-time information on the health of your infrastructure. It is a feature-rich tool offering many out-of-the-box integrations, automatic discovery, quick deployment, log and event reporting, built-in troubleshooting tools, and network, inventory, processes, and database monitoring. It has a simple pricing plan and offers new customers a 14-day free trial.
8. Datadog
Datadog was founded in 2010 and is a fantastic tool for cloud metrics, monitoring, and preparing in-house servers for cloud migration. The monitoring tool’s biggest asset is its compatibility with existing infrastructure. It is fair to say that Datadog can integrate with every operating system released, even the most obscure.
9. ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is a cost-effective and easy-to-use server monitoring software application that focuses on the performance and health of the network. The key features of this monitoring tool include end-to-end network monitoring, network traffic flow visualization, WAN link monitoring, multi-level thresholds, and customizable dashboards. A possible disadvantage of this tool is that it requires a good deal of manual configuration. Customers are able to opt for a price plan that meets their needs and may even take advantage of a free trial, allowing the monitoring of up to three devices.
10. Solarwinds
Serving over 300,000 customers across 190 countries, Solarwinds is one of the leading players within the server monitoring and network management space. Offering end-to-end monitoring support, Solarwinds is user-friendly and easy to set up, automatically detecting connected network devices and allowing you to start monitoring promptly. Notable features include forecast and capacity planning, the creation of Wi-Fi heat maps, customizable dashboards, and alert and reporting systems. Solarwinds can be deployed in almost any environment.
In December 2020, the Solarwinds Orion monitoring tool was infected with malware that was distributed to an unknown number of customers. This security breach opened up customer infrastructure to the hacking community, and the exploit allowed them to execute remote ‘jobs’ on any compromised server and traverse the victim’s network using “god mode” privileges to compromise any connected server and perform data theft. Solarwinds has stated the issue has been patched. Solarwinds still makes the top 10 list due to the years of a track record they have along with the numerous Fortune 100 companies that utilize the software. Please take these pros and cons into consideration when selecting your software.
How Can Atlantic.Net Help?
Are you looking for a leading hosting provider to host your monitoring solution? Look no further than Atlantic.Net. With over 30 years of proven experience, our full suite of managed services and always available professional support team is able to build the perfect solution for your business or organization. We also include a complimentary monitoring solution for our cloud customers.
Atlantic.Net stands ready to help you attain fast compliance with a range of certifications, such as SOC 2 and SOC 3, HIPAA, and HITECH, all with 24x7x365 support, monitoring, and world-class data center infrastructure. For faster application deployment, free IT architecture design, and assessment, visit us at www.atlantic.net, call 888-618-DATA (3282), or email us at [email protected].
You can find out more information by contacting our sales team today!
