As our businesses are increasingly reliant on network connectivity, network monitoring tools are an absolute necessity. If you can’t keep track of who is connecting to your network and identify bottlenecks, you risk hampering your employees’ productivity and aggravating your clients. Your IT team will appreciate it if you provide them with the right resources to monitor your company’s network.
To help you improve your efficiency, we put together a list of the top 13 network monitoring tools with the pros and cons for each.
Top 13 Network Monitoring Tools
- Solar Winds Network Performance Monitor – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Versatility
- DataDog Network Performance Monitoring – Best Open-Source Network Monitoring Tool
- Nagios – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Agentless Monitoring
- Auvik – Best Network Monitoring Tool for VPN Monitoring
- Zabbix – Best Free Network Monitoring Tool
- Icinga – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Flexibility
- ManageEngine OpManager – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Diverse Device Types
- Site 24X7 Network Monitoring – Best Network Monitoring Tool for VoIP Monitoring
- Paessler PRTG Network Monitor – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Network Availability
- Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Beginners
- Progress WhatsUp Gold – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Managing Dependencies
- Observium – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Ease of Use
- Connectwise Automate – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Remote Management
1. Solar Winds Network Performance Monitor – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Versatility
Pricing: Free trial, License: $1,638+ (contact sales)
One of the industry leaders in network performance monitoring, this tool will allow you to monitor your network across vendors. Moreover, it will reveal important insights to help garner deeper visibility into your network. This software enables you to create custom Wi-Fi maps to scrutinize your client coverage and identify dead zones. You can also use their calculator to determine your network’s exhaustion rates based on peak and average network usage.
| Pros | Cons |
| Quickly detects issues to avoid downtime | Heat maps don’t always work |
| View business-critical services easily | |
| Excellent alert management | |
| Flexible dashboards, many customizations |
2. DataDog Network Performance Monitoring – Best Open-Source Network Monitoring Tool
Pricing: Free trial, Performance Monitoring: $5/host/month, Device Monitoring: $7/host/month
On the affordable side of the spectrum, DataDog is a SaaS that helps you monitor your network and see across apps, systems, and devices. Developers appreciate that it allows you to troubleshoot your apps with open-source libraries and monitor your cloud architecture. The alert system is sophisticated, you can trigger alerts for various latency percentiles and identify unexpected latency difficulties. This tool is not for the faint of heart, but experienced users appreciate that it comes with over 400 services and technologies right out of the box.
| Pros | Cons |
| Addresses customer pain points directly | No built-in Mac OS support |
| Tracks logs in real-time | Difficult to integrate with other tools |
| Easily search and filter errors | Not good for beginners |
| Create useful custom dashboards |
3. Nagios – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Agentless Monitoring
Pricing: Nagios Core: Free license, Nagios XI: Standard License: $1,995, Enterprise License: $3.495
Nagios provides IT infrastructure monitoring in two different forms. They have a free license called Nagios Core in addition to Nagios XI, a paid license. While Nagios Core is free, it is hardly limited, it is an open-source tool that reliably identifies problems, allowing you to resolve them easily. Meanwhile, Nagios XI is an enterprise-grade solution for teams that need agentless monitoring – so you don’t need to install extra software on your endpoint devices. Especially impressive are its dashboards and advanced visualization techniques which help you increase availability and identify bottlenecks across your network.
| Pros | Cons |
| Nagios XI has more features than Core | Nagios XI is expensive |
| Toggle alerts for group/individual level | Software must run on Linux |
| Industry-standard | Configuration is difficult |
4. Auvik – Best Network Monitoring Tool for VPN Monitoring
Pricing: Contact sales
These days, teams are increasingly turning to remote work, as a result, they often encounter VPN issues. Auvik gets you to the root cause of your VPN issues. Protect your remote workers from VPN capacity issues and monitor each VPN session. Moreover, get answers to specific questions like whether your internet connectivity problems are caused by your network or your ISP. Perhaps most importantly, your team will appreciate that it only takes an hour to set up.
| Pros | Cons |
| Auvik is more flexible than its competitors | Expensive |
| Great for viewing networked devices | Takes a while to learn |
| Great customer support | For advanced users |
5. Zabbix – Best Free Network Monitoring Tool
Pricing: Free plan, Free trial, Customizations: $1,600+/year
Looking for a free network monitoring tool that puts you ahead of problems rather than behind? Zabbix allows you to monitor performance issues proactively so you can predict downtimes and identify trends in network usage. The tool is constantly searching for usage anomalies to optimize your network performance and health. It will also detect configuration changes automatically, like when you have upgraded firmware, or a module is added or removed.
| Pros | Cons |
| Monitors proactively | Difficult to configure new environments |
| Easy to use | Better for Linux users |
| Consistent over many features | Not as flexible as other software |
6. Icinga – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Flexibility
Pricing: Free plan, Custom pricing: Contact sales
For a free network monitoring tool, Icinga is remarkably flexible. Empower every member of your IT team to solve problems with Icinga’s quick actions. Then, build customized dashboards to analyze network activity properly. Icinga is extremely scalable, a single Icinga instance handles many servers from the beginning, and it comes with built-in clustering so you can monitor up to thousands of servers. In addition, you will appreciate that you can monitor private, public, and hybrid clouds all in one system.
| Pros | Cons |
| Excellent basic functionality | Doesn’t meet advanced requirements |
| Easy to use API | Poor visualization tools |
| Useful alert system |
7. ManageEngine OpManager – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Diverse Device Types
Pricing: Standard License: $245 (10 Devices), Professional: $345 (10 devices), Enterprise: $11,545 (250 devices), Contact sales for custom quote
You should strive to monitor every possible device type that connects to your network. OpManager empowers your team to track everything from routers and switches to firewalls and VMs. Monitor these entities in real-time with over 2000 performance tools. Afterward, you can analyze network performance using customized dashboards with over 200 performance widgets at your disposal. The WAN link monitoring is especially effective as it accounts for jitter, latency, and RTT.
| Pros | Cons |
| Auto-discovers devices | Difficult to customize alerts |
| Dashboard works out of the box | The web version lags |
| Provides information about all vendors/devices | Constantly updating software |
8. Site 24X7 Network Monitoring – Best Network Monitoring Tool for VoIP Monitoring
Pricing: Free trial, Billed annually: Ranges from $9-$225+/month depending on add-ons
Another tool that is especially effective for remote teams, you will appreciate Site24X7 because of its optimized Firewall and VPN monitoring. Unlike several other monitoring tools listed, Site24X7 lets you ensure the quality of your VoIP connections. Furthermore, they provide you with the ability to monitor your website’s latency from over 110 different locations around the world. Finally, the diverse alerting mechanisms allow you to receive notifications from sources such as voice calls and RSS feeds.
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to set up and manage | Occasionally gives false alarms |
| Variety of alert systems | Manually change plans as your usage changes |
| No automatic server intervention |
9. Paessler PRTG Network Monitor – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Network Availability
Pricing: Free Trial, License: $1,450 – $13,930
If you need a wealth of options for every type of network monitoring, Paessler likely offers them. Their in-depth reporting features allow you to monitor many assets, including IoT devices, web pages, and cloud services. They focus on high availability with their automatic failover monitoring, another node will always pick up the slack for those that fail. Your IT team will enjoy the 10 different alert types they offer including alarm audio and .exe files.
| Pros | Cons |
| Great for monitoring traffic | Doesn’t monitor VOIP traffic |
| Integrates with all your systems | Difficult to learn |
| Easily configure and update alerts |
10. Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Beginners
Pricing: Free
As a free network troubleshooting tool, Spiceworks differs from others with its easy-to-use dashboard. The intuitive tool is color-coded, enabling you to identify slow apps and connectivity issues between websites and remote infrastructure in real-time. Finally, your entire company will love their built-in help desk software to help you quickly resolve network issues.
| Pros | Cons |
| Helps IT teams communicate to users | Not good for complex use cases |
| Easy to set up | Must install agents on each PC |
| Perfect for small teams |
11. Progress WhatsUp Gold – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Managing Dependencies
Pricing: Contact sales
Network visibility is critical, WhatsUp Gold lets you discover, visualize and then map device dependencies. This enables you to identify and resolve problems before they affect your end-users. You can also customize your network maps to match your virtual architecture, it even lets you overlay your wireless infrastructure on top. Moreover, their auto-device discovery tool is extremely potent, collecting every bit of data and allowing you to scan to detect layers.
| Pros | Cons |
| Swiftly resolve issues | Poor tutorials, hard to learn |
| Good customer support | Outdated software |
| Extremely in-depth for the price |
12. Observium – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Ease of Use
Pricing: Free plan, Professional: $268/year, Enterprise: $1,338/year
Low-maintenance tools like Observium are perfect for tedious tasks like network monitoring. As it supports all the popular platforms and systems, Observium automatically discovers all your assets. On the paid plans, they also allow you to group devices automatically based on your own rules. Additionally, the software facilitates disaster recovery planning with its proactive planning tools.
| Pros | Cons |
| Extremely affordable | Cannot create web traffic reports |
| Good UX | Minimal dashboard customization |
| Extremely versatile | Not scalable |
13. Connectwise Automate – Best Network Monitoring Tool for Remote Management
Pricing: Free trial, Contact sales
Part of Connectwise’s larger “Automate” IT solution for data management, their network monitoring helps you adhere to best practices as you detect issues ahead of time. Connectwise also has sophisticated remote management tools, it enables you to audit individual remote sessions. Find out who is connected, for how long, and for what reason. Finally, their virtual machine monitoring is equipped with best-in-class infrastructure from their virtualization manager to work with VMWare and Hyper-V.
| Pros | Cons |
| Easily solve problems remotely | Poor customer support |
| Extremely robust | Mediocre reporting |
| Granular (Customer-level) alerts | Not all automation features function |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are network monitoring tools and how do they work?
Network monitoring tools help IT teams resolve network performance issues. In the background, these tools will track every device, app, and service that connects to your network and detect issues with things like latency in real-time. They generally include network mapping to assist you in identifying bottlenecks. Many tools will also offer a dashboard to analyze network activities and optimize your network performance. Furthermore, IT and DevOps teams can also create rules to help automate their monitoring processes to maintain the network while receiving alerts when things go wrong.
An appropriate network monitoring tool seeks to make IT teams more efficient while also bolstering your entire company’s productivity due to smoother network connectivity. Finally, they can aid you in securing your network from external threats.
What are the different types of network monitoring tools?
Typically, we can divide network monitoring tools into three categories: monitoring tools, security and backup tools, and management tools. Often, the different types of network tools are integrated into the same software package. Monitoring tools will help you survey activities on your network initiated by devices and users to help you offer better connectivity. Meanwhile, security tools will help you protect your network from suspicious devices and other threats while periodically backing up the data on your network. Finally, management tools are quite broad. They entail the administration and governance of your entire network; this will help you plan for your network performance in the future.
What is SNMP monitoring and how does it work?
SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP is a protocol standardized across the internet to collect and organize information about servers and network devices. In addition, the SNMP contains rules regarding the changes to that information that affect those network devices. Of the tools we listed, Solar Winds and Paessler both offer SNMP monitoring.
What is agentless monitoring?
Network monitoring tools that offer agentless monitoring allow you to track various devices on your network without needing to install software on the device and server endpoints that you monitor. This can be helpful if you want to gather data on your users and services efficiently and without much disturbance.
What is the best tool to monitor your network?
While there are several high-quality network monitoring tools for different use cases, Solar Winds is probably the best tool to monitor your network. Their versatile offerings include Wi-Fi mapping and advanced alerting systems. They also help teams with complex use cases scale intelligently.
What is the best open-source network monitoring tool?
DataDog and Nagios are two excellent open-source network monitoring tools that facilitate customization. Developers will appreciate the sheer abundance of tools that DataDog offers its users. However, Nagios Core might be better if you’re on a budget since the tool is free.
What is the best free network monitoring tool?
While Nagios Core is a quality tool that offers free functionality, Zabbix is the free network monitoring tool that offers users the most. While it is not as flexible as paid tools, they offer a consistent user experience across all their features as you use them to detect and resolve issues before they affect end-users.