If you work with the IT infrastructure of any size company, it’s likely that one part of your job is network monitoring. Monitoring can be vital to making sure networks stay fast, secure, and stable, so it’s important to find the right monitoring tools for a network’s needs. To do this, you can learn about open-source monitoring tools, which are flexible and often free. In this article, we explain what open-source monitoring tools are and provide a list of nine options you can consider.
What are open-source monitoring tools?
An important aspect of running any network is network monitoring. This allows you to analyze the most and least used parts of a network, prevent outages quickly notice them if they occur, and identify cybersecurity threats. The right network monitoring tools can be beneficial to the performance, security, and speed of a network. The main areas of a network you may want to monitor are the network performance, the cloud infrastructure, applications, and the real-time server activity.
When looking for a monitoring tool, consider open-source tools. Open-source tools allow you to modify code, customize the tool to a network’s needs, and connect with a community of other developers doing their own customizations that you might find useful. Another benefit of open-source tools is that they’re frequently free, though some may also offer a paid version with extra features. Here are a few things to consider when deciding on an open-source tool:
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Features: Make sure the tool has the features you need and pay close attention to which features are free and which ones may require extra payment.
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Community: Open-source tools often rely on the developer community for fixes and ideas, so it’s helpful to find a tool with a lot of active users.
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Support: Although open-source tools rarely have a tech support team you can call, they do often have tutorials and help documents, so finding a tool with an expansive knowledge base can be effective.
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Compatibility: Even open-source tools that offer many customization options may not integrate with the tools you already use, so it’s important to check for compatibility before committing.
9 open-source monitoring tools
Here are nine open-source monitoring tools you might consider using:
1. Prometheus
The main features of Prometheus are its dashboard display of network metrics and its network alerts. Prometheus displays metrics with highly detailed visualizations that you can use to generate reports or watch the real-time metrics. You can customize which network issues Prometheus alerts you to, such as cybercrime, high CPU usage, and high memory usage. You can also categorize alerts by severity, type, and status.
2. Zabbix
Zabbix is a flexible open-source monitoring tool with many options for customizing your interface, alerts, remediation, and more. It monitors a wide range of network features, such as performance, server availability, applications, and databases. You can schedule and automate many of Zabbix’s features, which may mean you won’t have to spend as much time checking networks manually.
3. Nagios Core
Nagios Core is the free version of an open-source monitoring tool that monitors and alerts for most types of components like networks, infrastructure, servers, and applications. Although the paid version has more features, support, and pre-made dashboards, Nagios Core has all the critical features necessary to monitor a typical network. You can also add functionality with plug-ins that allow for graphing, reporting, and third-party app integration.
4. Cacti
Cacti is a monitoring tool with strong data-gathering functionality that allows you to create custom scripts for data gathering, turn that data into many kinds of graphs, and display bandwidth statistics. It can discover devices and networks automatically, monitor thousands of devices, and provide extensive detail on network metrics. With Cacti, administrators can create different levels of users and give them different permissions.
5. OpenNMS
OpenNMS is a monitoring tool with built-in reporting, an intuitive user interface, and a customizable dashboard. It can monitor many aspects of a network, including performance, traffic, device temperature, and power supply. OpenNMS also features capacity forecasting, email, and text notifications for network alerts and is highly scalable for any network size.
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4. Checkmk
Checkmk primarily monitors infrastructure and applications but also has network monitoring capabilities. It offers a high degree of automation, which makes a wider range of monitoring possible and it can free a lot of time for IT employees to focus on other work. It features a quick setup, nearly 2,000 official integrations, and allows you to customize the specific metrics you want to monitor for a given network.
5. Icinga
Icinga monitors for network-related issues like outages, security, and performance. It also generates metrics and issues alerts. It features auto-discovery for new devices, tracking tools, and cross-platform support, and can monitor the on-site infrastructure and the cloud infrastructure. Icinga also offers templates that can help smaller businesses or less experienced network administrators start monitoring right away while they learn how to customize the system.
6. LibreNMS
LibreNMS is a flexible monitoring tool that covers a wide range of operating systems and features extensive mobile device support so that you can monitor the network from anywhere. Its alert system can notify you on almost any platform, such as email, text, and Slack. You can also scale LibreNMS horizontally as your network expands.7. Netdata
Netdata is a monitoring tool that features powerful real-time monitoring of network health and performance and can auto-detect thousands of metrics. Its alarm notification system detects and alerts you to performance issues like slowdowns or anomalies, while also providing visualization of metrics that can allow you to more easily detect anomalies manually. Netdata also features quick installation and metric-saving that automatically moves older metrics to disk to free up RAM space.
8. Monitorix
Monitorix is a lightweight monitoring tool that can be effective for smaller businesses with less extensive network monitoring needs. It can detect failures, network security issues, and slow network performance, and generate graphs of network statistics. If you’re interested in basic monitoring, you might try Monitorix.
9. Observium
Observium is an auto-discovering network monitoring tool that runs primarily on Linux but has support for other devices. It features a fast and easy setup, an intuitive interface, and a wide range of add-ons for additional functionality. Observium also allows you to set your own threshold and failure states so that you can customize the alerts it sends you.
I hope you find this article helpful.
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