The best enterprise network monitoring tools

Tools and solutions: Zabbix, Paessler-PRTG Enterprise Monitor, DataDog, LogicMonitor, ManageEngine

Challenges for large ITs & requirements for large IT monitoring

In a world where enterprise IT is getting larger and more complex, large infrastructure monitoring faces several challenges that might not arise in small to medium networks. Many different IT layers need to be converged, many vendor-specific devices, technologies, and monitoring tools need to be integrated, there are different processes for various specialized and distributed teams, and there is a need for the unified monitoring of multiple distributed locations, to name just a few challenges for complex and large IT environments.

This makes enterprise network monitoring a critical IT function that offers a wide range of benefits for companies of all sizes. In this article, we will be discussing the challenges associated with enterprise network monitoring, why your business should invest in this practice, and share insights on features you will need to keep in mind when choosing a tool.

We will also present what are, in our opinion, 10 of the best enterprise network monitoring tools available, including some free and open-source options, for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a novice admin or an experienced network engineer, we hope this article will provide a comprehensive guide to empower you with the knowledge needed to choose the monitoring tool that best aligns with your specific requirements.

Our Newsroom Consultants have collected some of large IT infrastructure monitoring tools on the market that are able to face these challenges.

What are the best enterprise network monitoring tools?

Paessler PRTG Enterprise Monitor

PRTG Enterprise Monitor is enterprise monitoring software by Paessler for monitoring large and distributed IT infrastructure. It provides unified monitoring in one management console with a centralized overview of the metrics of all IT and IIoT components that make up your on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.

Very appealing is the fact that PRTG Enterprise Monitor is an all-in-one monitoring solution that includes all features, no matter the pricing model you choose. It is agentless and vendor agnostic and uses many popular technologies and protocols for device integration. For easy deployment, it comes with various device templates as well as more than 250 preconfigured sensors for well-known vendors. You can also use various custom sensors or the PRTG API to customize your monitoring according to your needs and requirements.

With PRTG Enterprise Monitor, you can monitor multiple, distributed locations by scaling horizontally using as many PRTG installations as you need. The monitoring data from these distributed PRTG servers is brought together in ITOps Board that is included in the monitoring package. It provides clear and structured dashboards for a business service-level overview of your entire infrastructure including SLA performance and availability. Automated alert management functionality collects and filters alerts from all PRTG servers, maps them to business services, and prioritizes them according to user roles.

What makes PRTG Enterprise Monitor attractive from a pricing point of view is its subscription-based licensing model. Each license comes with all features and functionalities including ITOps Board, and is based on the number of sensors that you need so that you can deploy an unlimited number of PRTG servers and devices. A subscription license starts at $17,599 per year and pricing is flexibly adjusted if your infrastructure grows. Download

ManageEngine OpManager Plus

OpManager Plus is the unified monitoring and IT operations management solution by ManageEngine for large IT infrastructures. It offers a unified management console for visibility across all IT infrastructure components on-premises or in the cloud, including the network, server and storage, application, and security layer.

OpManager Plus is agentless and provides preconfigured integrations for third-party tools as well as other, REST API-based integrations. A huge number of built-in vendor and device templates help you to deploy your monitoring more easily. However, you need different add-ons and plugins to fulfill different monitoring needs like firewall management or application performance monitoring.

The monitoring solution offers remote monitoring of several locations via probe-based scaling, where several probe servers act as polling engines that send the data back to a central server. The collected data can be visualized in unified dashboards like maps, business views, and even 3D floor views. A nice little feature in OpManager Plus is a machine learning-based IT workflow automation engine with which System Administrators can automate routine tasks for L1 and L2 fault management.

OpManager Plus has a device-based licensing model where license packs are subdivided into different device and feature bundles. Other features and monitoring or management requirements need to be bought additionally as add-ons or plugins. Particularly in large infrastructure, costs can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Download

Nagios

Nagios is a popular, Linux-based open-source network monitoring solution for monitoring your business-critical IT infrastructure components. There are two versions: the free Nagios Core offers basic functionalities for monitoring and managing IT environments but without support. Meanwhile, Nagios XI is the “commercial” version, available through subscriptions and with many extra features.

There are a huge number of community-developed, free add-ons for Nagios, as well as multiple APIs, allowing you to integrate, for example, network components or third-party applications from any vendor or provider. This high level of customization, however, also means that the configuration and setup need time and special knowledge, especially in the Core edition.

Nagios XI takes away some of the pain, with fast configuration wizards, configuration snapshots, infrastructure management features (including bulk host import, auto-discovery, auto decommissioning, and Mass Acknowledgment), an updated user interface with advanced graphing capabilities, easier user management, and more.

Besides the free Nagios Core, there are two Nagios IX commercial editions (Standard and Enterprise) that start at $2,495, going up with the number of nodes being monitored. There is also a free version of Nagios XI that can be used as a trial, but it can only monitor 7 nodes or 100 services (whichever comes first) and has no support.

Zabbix

Zabbix comes with more than 250 built-in templates that are backed by known vendors and partners, in addition to the huge number of monitoring and integration templates provided by the Zabbix community. Furthermore, it has a lot of machine-learning-based automation features such as dynamic threshold allocation, trend prediction, anomaly detection, or automated Q/A tests for web applications. What also makes Zabbix attractive is its adaptability due to its scope of customization options via APIs, macros, regular expressions, and more.

As open-source software, Zabbix is free of charge. However, one should always consider the number of people and the amount of time that needs to be invested for setting up, configuring, customizing, and maintaining the monitoring software particularly for very large environments. Download

Zabbix is an enterprise-class IT infrastructure monitoring solution with which users can collect, store, analyze, and manage date from all kinds of sources. If you prefer open-source tools and are ready to dive into the configuration and customization work that comes with it, Zabbix should be considered when it comes to monitoring large on-premises or cloud infrastructure with tens of thousands of devices.

This high level of scalability is reached using intelligent algorithms and the deployment of proxies that collect data and send it back to a central server. With the help of proxies, you can also monitor distributed locations as well as multi-tenant environments. However, for monitoring operating systems and specific application metrics, you need to install and configure agents that also require maintenance work.

Datadog

Datadog is a SaaS platform that provides cloud-based IT infrastructure and application performance monitoring as well as log management functionalities. It can be deployed in all sorts of environments from on-premises, hybrid, and IoT infrastructures to multi-cloud environments.

The monitoring tool offers built-in integrations for Kubernetes, Docker, and more than 500 other, vendor-backed technologies, which makes it easy to unify all monitoring needs across all systems, applications, and services. In addition, Datadog is highly scalable due to the use of an agent that lets you monitor multiple distributed locations, even secured virtual private clouds.

Quite appealing are Datadog’s dashboards and service maps, with which you can visualize, for example, data flows in real time. Datadog offers auto-generated dashboards as well as vast customization possibilities via drag-and-drop widgets. Also interesting are Datadog’s machine learning-based functionalities such as dynamically adapted alerts, root cause analysis, automatic detection and grouping of infrastructure anomalies, and forecasting.

In comparison to PRTG Enterprise Monitor, for example, a Datadog subscription does not come with the full feature set. There are different modules for different monitoring requirements that each have different pricing plans based on different parameters for cost calculation. This can get quite complex and confusing and might get very expensive depending on the size of your infrastructure. Download

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that offers unified insights into metrics, applications, and logs. The monitoring tool automatically discovers and monitors components across distributed on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

LogicMonitor comes with built-in integrations for Kubernetes and more than 2,000 other technologies, as well as preconfigured monitoring modules and templates. It uses agentless collectors for gathering monitoring data and for scalability purposes.

Like Datadog, LogicMonitor provides AIOps functionalities to analyze root causes for issues, detect anomalies, and use forecasting to predict trends and prevent issues that could impact business services. Alerts are based on dynamic thresholds that are set according to the requirements of your environment. In terms of automated visualization, LogicMonitor offers dynamically generated topology maps that show data flows between complex component structures.

Pricing for LogicMonitor is device-based and comes with two subscription plans: Pro for up to 199 devices and Enterprise for more than 200 devices. The price per device depends on the individual quote you get. While both plans include the full basic feature stack, you need the Enterprise plan to get the AIOps functionalities as well. Download

What are the challenges of monitoring enterprise infrastructures?

Convergence of many different IT layers

Convergence of many different IT layers: In large networks, many different layers need to be consolidated in your monitoring: from hardware servers and devices and completely virtualized environments through to IoT (Internet of Things) devices and a huge number of applications, services, etc. These different components can be installed on-premises, hosted in the cloud, or both, as most IT infrastructures today exist in a hybrid environment.

Different monitoring requirements for different industries

Depending on the industry you work in, this can get even more complex. IT environments in the healthcare sector, for example, have different requirements to large and complex environments in the industrial sector, where IT administrators need to consider IT/OT convergence and Industrial IoT components as well, as all the specialized technologies that come with it.

Integration of many vendor-specific devices, technologies, and monitoring tools

In enterprise IT, you usually need to integrate devices, services, and applications from various manufacturers and providers. These devices often come with specific technologies and protocols that need to be integrated into the monitoring in addition to the usual technologies. Moreover, many vendors provide their monitoring software with their devices. This can lead to infrastructures where 10 to 15 different monitoring tools for various purposes such as virtualization, storage, performance, or database monitoring are maintained at the same time, each with its own configuration, and look & feel.

Remote monitoring of multiple, distributed networks

Large IT environments are usually distributed over multiple geographic locations with many networks and subnetworks that can be completely independent of each other for security purposes or that are interconnected in one way or the other. The question that arises for System Administrators who need to monitor such distributed networks is if they need to implement even more monitoring tools for each remote location, or if they have the possibility of unified monitoring with a single tool that can consolidate all distributed networks in one management console.

Different processes for many specialized and distributed IT teams

In small to medium-sized businesses, there is often only one team or even a single person who monitors the IT environment. This is also different in large infrastructures, where many different teams – which are usually highly specialized – work from many different locations, have different workflows and processes, and use many different tools for different purposes. It is therefore important to consider how such teams can work together from a central management console with centralized views of the various components that make up a large infrastructure, and how these teams can be alerted and notified in case of issues.

What are the requirements for enterprise infrastructure monitoring tools?

In short, based on the challenges that we listed previously, tools for monitoring large IT infrastructure should meet the following requirements:

• Monitor business-critical metrics for hardware, virtual, and IoT components in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments
• Support the integration of servers, devices, applications, and many other components from all kinds of vendors and providers
• Provide distributed monitoring of multiple remote locations and networks while at the same time offering a central overview
• Offer built-in and customizable alerting, reports, and dashboards
• Provide user and access rights management, also for distributed teams
• Scale easily and flexibly in terms of performance, tooling, and pricing as infrastructure grows
• Provide automation for routine tasks and configurations or even more advanced machine-learning-based functionalities

Why Should You Invest in Enterprise Network Monitoring Tools?

There are many reasons to invest in Enterprise Network Monitoring Tools. Here are five of them, in no particular order.

1. Performance optimization: continuous monitoring can help you pinpoint issues and identify optimization opportunities that will improve your enterprise network’s performance, sometimes without the need for hardware upgrades.

2. Security: monitoring allows you to spot signs of uncommon behavior or usage patterns indicative of an intrusion attempt or ongoing attack. This will give you time to react and deploy countermeasures before a data breach or service interruption occurs.

3. Resource allocation: with careful monitoring, you will be able to find out where resources are being underutilized or overutilized, allowing you to redistribute them according to real needs to ensure the most effective usage of your systems.

4. Proactive maintenance: monitoring allows you to detect potential issues before they become critical, and schedule time to fix them before they result in outages that may affect the performance of your applications or even the availability and profitability of your business.

5. Regulatory compliance: businesses that handle sensitive information, like financial or healthcare data, need to meet strict regulatory standards (like PCI DSS, SOC, or legal frameworks such as the GDPR in Europe) that specify how this information is stored and handled. Monitoring will allow you to prove compliance with these standards and secure approvals that may be crucial to keeping your business running.

What Are the Requirements for Enterprise Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?

In short, based on the challenges that we listed previously, tools for monitoring large IT infrastructure should meet the following requirements:

• Monitor business-critical metrics for hardware, virtual, and IoT components in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
• Support the integration of servers, devices, applications, and many other components from all kinds of vendors and providers.
• Provide distributed monitoring of multiple remote locations and networks, while at the same time offering a central overview.
• Offer built-in and customizable alerting, reports, and dashboards.
• Provide user and access rights management, as well as distributed teams.
• Scale easily and flexibly in terms of performance, tooling, and pricing as infrastructure grows.
• Provide automation for routine tasks and configurations, or even more advanced machine-learning-based functionalities.