1. Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise-class network monitoring tool that provides real-time monitoring, automatic discovery, mapping, and scalability through data collected from servers, virtual machines, and network devices.

Zabbix enterprise monitoring software provides users with built-in Java application server monitoring, hardware monitoring, VMware monitoring and CPU, memory, network, disk space performance monitoring.

The enterprise network monitoring tool is capable of performing 3,000,000 checks per minute for enhanced security and data center monitoring.

2. Nagios

Nagios is an open source software tool for monitoring IT infrastructure and viewing current status, historical logs, and basic reports. Nagios users can monitor system metrics, network protocols, applications, servers, network infrastructure and receive fault alerts.

Nagios provides three types of network management tools, Nagios XL, Nagios Log Server and Nagios Network Analyzer. The Nagios XL is best suited for network monitoring (although the other two also offer network monitoring services).

Nagios XL provides enterprise-class network monitoring, providing users with bandwidth reports, network heartbeat monitoring, custom urls, email reports, and remote machine monitoring. The upgraded Enterprise edition provides web-based server console access, business process monitoring, record auditing, and automated deletion capabilities.

3. Cacti

Originally released in 2001, Cacti is an open source Web-based network monitoring and graphics tool designed for data logging. It can be used to display network data in real time, such as CPU load or bandwidth utilization.

Cacti is a front-end application for RRDtool, an open source database tool for storing real-time changing data. It uses SNMP as its default collection algorithm, but if you prefer native Perl PHP scripts, you can also use them.

Its latest version, 0.8.8H, was released in May 2016 and features unlimited graphics projects, graphics auto-fill support, graphics data processing, custom data acquisition scripts, built-in SNMP support, graphics templates, data source templates, host templates, and user-based management.

4. GroundWork Monitor Core

GroundWork Monitor Core is a platform for monitoring network, application and cloud computing usage. The open source version includes licenses to monitor up to 50 devices and community-based support, and there are commercial versions of the software.

In terms of its network management functions, GroundWork provides self-discovery and maintenance of networks and devices, topology, alarm control, data collection through API/SNMP/IPMI and support for OpenDaylight SDN.

GroundWork also provides storage management, supporting large-scale enterprise-level vendors such as NetApp and EMC, as well as data collection and storage buffering and interruption visualization from disk, block or object storage.

Due to GroundWork’s one-stop network management approach, such kits may be better suited to large businesses and enterprises looking for established brands rather than developer-focused tools such as Big Brother or Big Sister.

5. Hyperic

VMware’s Hyperic tools are used to monitor Web applications and their performance in physical, virtual, or cloud environments. It applies to application servers, Web servers, databases, operating systems, virtual machine hypervisors, messaging services, and directory servers.

Hyperic provides infrastructure and operating system monitoring, detailed reporting, application and middleware monitoring, alert and repair workflows, and a common extensible API.

The network monitoring tool is available in an enterprise version that improves network alert capabilities and provides better baseline creation.

6. Observium

Linux-based Observium is an automatic monitoring network monitoring tool. According to the website, “Developed and maintained by a team of experienced professional network engineers and system administrators, Observium is a platform designed and built by users themselves.”

Observium offers community and professional versions, uses RRDTool for buffering storage and graphical functionality, and has an easy-to-use user interface and reporting capabilities. However, it has no report export capability, which can be a problem for business applications.

The Community release will provide users with full automatic monitoring of all supported devices or metrics, network mapping through automatic discovery protocols, automatic identification of hundreds of devices, and a new release every six months.

Professional users will get all the features of the community version and will also get real-time software updates and fixes, rule-based automatic grouping, network threshold and status alert systems, and traffic statistics.

7. NetXMS

NetXMS provides enterprise-class open source network management and monitoring programs with a simple user interface on Windows and Linux.

NetXMS provides distributed network monitoring, automated network discovery, and detailed reporting for all layers of the IT infrastructure with a relatively simple installation process.

In addition, server appliances and agents are fairly lightweight for such a comprehensive product.

8. Pandora FMS

Designed for the enterprise, Pandora FMS provides a sleek and clean user experience with easy-to-read quick insight tools and important network statistics such as network status, reported alarms, number of deployed agents, and a list of other recently executed tasks.

Pandora FMS can perform network diagnostics without external access, which means users can respond to any network problems more quickly. In fact, FMS claims that the monitor system responds in about 10 seconds in proxy mode.

9. NetDisco

NetDisco is designed for Unix-like operating systems. It provides network based automatic discovery of network devices through NSMP to generate network topology. It is designed for medium to large networks.

The network management tool can be used to locate devices, create device directories, and report IP addresses and switch port usage.

NetDisco users can locate machines on the network by MAC or IP, turn off switch ports, or change the VLAN or PoE status of ports, count network hardware by model, vendor, software, and operating system, and create a detailed topology of your network.

10.OpenNMS

OpenNMS was released in 1999 to provide event management, service monitoring, and performance measurement for large enterprise users.

Key features that will benefit enterprise users include external scripting, sending alerts to intercom engineers, extending Java native notification policy apis, request tracing (RT) integration, advanced alerts, IPv4 and IPv6 network reacablability over ICMP, test status, and node inventory information.

Enterprise services or “style” networks provide capabilities such as preset events, notifications, data collection, workflows, and additional reporting.

11. RANCID

RANCID sounds like a negative name unless you learn Really Awesome New Cisco configuration. This means it can monitor the configuration of routers or other devices and maintain a history of any changes. RANCID supports a wide range of vendor devices, including Juniper routing, HP switches, Redback NAS and many extended devices for Observium.

RANCID supports many vendor devices, including Juniper routers, HP switches, Redback NAS and many others, as well as extended support for Observium.

RANCID provides a variety of network management capabilities, including logging into each device in the Router table (router-db), running various commands to retrieve information to be saved, sending any changes in previously collected information to the mailing list, and committing those changes to version control.

12. Xymon

Another network monitoring tool to mention is Xymon (formerly known as Hobbit). Xymon monitors servers, applications, and networks, providing information about the health of all these network components through web pages.

Its website states that the development of Xymon was inspired by Big Brother and, like Big Sister, attempts to address Big Brother BTF’s shortcomings, such as performance. Xymon is also easier to deploy and is free.

13. Big Brother BTF

Big Brother was founded in the mid-1990s to monitor network systems and was acquired by Quest Software, which in turn was acquired by Dell in 2012.

Many other network monitoring tools are modeled after Big Brother, so it has a large, detailed forum and helpful developer community that makes it a good choice for beginners.

In addition to an open source version available for student and non-commercial use, a commercial version called Big Brother Professional Edition is also available.

14. Big Sister

Thomas Aeby, the founder of Big Sister, said he was impressed with Big Brother’s network monitoring but wanted to improve its performance, reduce the number of alerts when bad things happen and make other improvements.

Big Sister provides network monitoring, node management, Doxygen filters and a Web application framework as part of Unix derivatives and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Big Sister is helpful to IT administrators who monitor networked systems. When the system fails, it notifies the administrator, generates a history log of state changes, and displays various system performance data.

15. Open Falcon

Open Falcon is an Open source operation and maintenance monitoring system developed by Xiaomi. Xiaomi has designed and developed xiaomi’s monitoring system, Open-Falcon, based on the requirements of Internet companies, your experience and feedback of SRE, SA and DEVS, combined with the monitoring of some big Internet companies in the industry and some thoughts of monitoring. Open-falcon’s goal is to be the most open and user-friendly enterprise monitoring product for the Internet.

Its characteristics are:

  • Powerful and flexible data collection: Automatic discovery, falcon-agent, SNMP, active user push, user-defined plug-in, opentsdb data model like (timestamp, endpoint, metric, key-value tags)
  • Horizontal expansion: Collects data, determines alarms, stores and queries historical data for hundreds of millions of times in each period
  • Efficient alarm policy management: Efficient Portal, policy templates, template inheritance and overwriting, multiple alarm modes, and callback invocation
  • Humanized alarm Settings include maximum alarm count, alarm severity, alarm recovery notification, alarm suspension, different thresholds in different time periods, and maintenance period
  • Efficient GRAPH component: reporting, archiving, and storing 2 million metric metrics on a single machine (1 minute cycle)
  • Efficient query component for historical data: RrdTool’s data archiving strategy returns hundreds of metrics for a year’s historical data in seconds
  • Dashboard: multi-dimensional data display, user-defined Screen
  • High availability: the whole system has no core single point, easy operation and maintenance, easy deployment, and horizontal expansion
  • Development language: Backend of the entire system, all written in Golang, portal and Dashboard written in Python.

16. Icinga

Icinga was originally a branch of Nagios. Icinga 2 is subtracted and provides distributed monitoring and multithreading frameworks that Nagios or Icinga 1 do not have. You can migrate from Nagios to Icinga 1 and then Icinga 2.

Like Nagios, Icinga can be used on almost any device, and works best with SNMP, custom plug-ins, and extensions.

Icinga provides a global monitoring and warning framework, just different from Nagios on the Web UI.

Icinga has a variety of Web UIs, and the main difference with Nagios is configuration, which users can do through the Web UI, eliminating troublesome configuration documents. This is a major benefit for those who manage configuration outside of the command line.

Icinga incorporates several mapping and monitoring kits (PNP4Nagios, inGraph and Graphite), which are absolutely reliable for visualization. Icinga also has extended reporting capabilities.

17. Ntop

The Ntop project, also known as Ntopng, has been in development on and off for a decade. It is a top network traffic monitoring tool, the Web graphical user interface is simple and smooth. It’s written in C and completely independent, and you just run the configuration to monitor a single process for a particular network interface, and that’s it.

Ntop provides easy-to-understand graphs and tables showing current and past network traffic, including protocols, sources, destinations, and histories of specific transactions, and even hosts at both ends. In addition, you’ll find extensive network utilization charts, real-time maps and trends, as well as plug-in frameworks for various add-ons such as NetFlow and sFlow. There is even a dedicated hardware monitor, Nbox, embedded in Ntop.

Ntop even uses the lightweight Lua API framework to support extensions through the scripting language. Ntop can also store host data in RRD files to support persistent data collection.

The most convenient use of Ntop is for field flow checks. When you notice that one of your Cacti PHP Weathermaps suddenly shows a red set of web links, that means the links are over 85% utilized, but you don’t know why. By switching to the Ntopng program to monitor that network segment, you can view the report of the highest traffic consumer per minute and immediately know which host is hogging traffic.

That visibility is priceless, and it’s easy to get. Essentially, you can run Ntopng on any port configured at the switch level to monitor any port or VLAN.

Article from CSDN, author: King Snake