IT monitoring tools; both on-premises and remote

Local or remote, your IT monitoring should fit your needs rather than the other way around. Here are the best IT monitoring tools remote and on-premises.

• PRTG, ManageEngine OpManager Plus, NetCrunch, LogicMonitor, Dynatrace, SolarWinds, Zabbix, DataDog, Nagios XI, New Relic

The 10 Best IT Monitoring Tools

PRTG

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is the well-known, tried and tested on-premise monitoring solution from Paessler. System administrators need to keep an eye on a growing number of devices, applications and various tools to make sure everything in their IT network is running smoothly. Even though there are — as shown above — many areas in IT, PRTG Network Monitor provides everything you would need to monitor all of them.

This solution can be used in all conceivable areas, whether industrial, service, or commercial. PRTG Network Monitor gives you a permanent overview of your network, all systems, and applications and sends alerts and notifications directly to your cell phone in case of a failure. There are no add-ons or additional plugins required, and hidden costs are not an issue.

The installation and initial configuration takes minutes thanks to automatic detection and more than 250 preconfigured monitoring sensors. And with the ability to mix and match them to create custom monitoring solutions, there is no limit to what you can monitor with PRTG. Data is collected via standard protocols such as ICMP, SNMP, WMI, HTTPS, OPC, or OPC UA.

For sysadmins looking for an on-premise IT monitoring solution that can do pretty much anything, PRTG Network Monitor is the best choice, as you get an intuitive monitoring tool that is easy to use.  It is available either with perpetual licenses (starting at US$ 1.899) or subscription licenses (starting at US$ 159 monthly), a flexible and affordable pricing scheme when compared with other tools. A 30-day free trial is available.

ManageEngine OpManager Plus

ManageEngine OpManager Plus offers a comprehensive IT operations management solution, eliminating the need for multiple monitoring tools, and providing greater visibility across IT infrastructure through its integrated approach. It offers out-of-the-box capabilities for monitoring various aspects of IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, IP addresses, switch ports, bandwidth, application usage, storage devices, and firewall rules.

With advanced monitoring and management capabilities, OpManager Plus offers four layers of visibility: security, application performance, server and storage, and network performance. It helps in identifying and troubleshooting faults at various levels easily, ensuring greater SLA compliance, proactive IT fault management, and consistent IT infrastructure performance.

With support for over 2,000 metrics across 10,000 devices, it simplifies IT operations monitoring, allowing you to monitor and manage both physical and virtual server infrastructure (Xen, VMware, Hyper-v, Nutanix) devices. It can monitor bandwidth and traffic, manage firewalls, IP addresses and switch ports, and has configuration and compliance management features.

ManageEngine OpManager Plus is available in two editions: Professional starts at US$ 1,233 for 50 devices, while Enteprise starts at US$ 19,995 for 1,000 devices. Keep in mind that some features, like distributed infrastructure monitoring, are only available in the Enterprise version. There is a 30-day free trial available.

NetCrunch

NetCrunch is a comprehensive tool for monitoring the classic network factors such as traffic, topology, systems, devices, as well as various services. It is known as a very solid IT monitoring solution that can do pretty much everything that ambitious system administrators would expect. 

Once you are familiar with the general functionality of the solution, NetCrunch’s policy- and template-based configuration makes managing thousands of nodes fairly easy. It uses an agentless and distributed monitoring model, with support for “countless protocols and APIs” and more than 650 ready-to-use monitoring targets and thousands of alerts.

It also automatically generates layer-2 maps and manages monitoring dependencies. There is full SNMP support with more than 8,700 MIBs and an integrated MIB compiler. The interface of NetCrunch is clean and nice to look at, but some could feel that especially the web interface has only a limited functionality. An integrated Grafana fork called GrafCrunch offers a powerful way to create custom visualizations of your data.

Like PRTG, NetCrunch is offered on either a subscription or perpetual licensing model, and three editions: Essentials, Professional and Enterprise. Prices vary with the number of nodes and interfaces being monitored, but start at US$ 55 per month for 25 nodes and interfaces on the Essential edition. A 30-day free trial is available.

LogicMonitor

A fascinating cloud-based monitoring solution, LogicMonitor does not inherently focus on classical IT monitoring, but it has a considerable feature set and focuses on advanced analysis of the collected data.

This sophisticated analysis contains some complex tools, which normal system administrators will have to get used to. In addition, LogicMonitor is probably a bit more expensive than other solutions on the market. However, if you look past these two points, you get a kick-ass solution here that is truly cloud native.

LogicMonitor comes with built-in integrations for more than 2,000 technologies, as well as preconfigured monitoring modules and templates. It uses agentless collectors for gathering monitoring data and for scalability purposes, and provides AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) functionalities to analyze root causes for issues, detect anomalies, and use forecasting to predict trends and prevent issues that could impact business services.

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. Pro gives you full access to LogicMonitor’s cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform, including automated deployment and configuration, intelligent alerting and customizable dashboards. Enterprise builds on everything Pro includes, and also gives you access to a full-suite of AI-based monitoring capabilities. 

Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers a comprehensive infrastructure observability solution that leverages AI-driven insights to monitor complex cloud and hybrid environments, providing automatic detection of issues and real-time answers, and boosting productivity and efficiency.

It is claimed that is “Davis” AI engine can boost the productivity of your engineers by up to 40%, reduce major outages and degradations by up to 60%, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) by 90%. It can auto-discover entities in your infrastructure in real-time, and map the relationships between them with zero manual configuration.

By automatically evaluating “billions of dependencies in milliseconds”, this tool can perform automated context and causation analysis and show the business impact of IT system events. It also offers seamless integration with automation platforms and incident remediation tools, enabling auto-remediation, automatic ticketing, and real-time CMDB updates.

Pricing for Dynatrace is dependent on which features, and how much monitoring, you need. Infrastructure Monitoring starts at US$ 0,04 per hour “for any size host”. However, keep in mind that features like Log Management & Analytics, Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic Monitoring are charged as extras.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a comprehensive monitoring solution for servers and applications, featuring easy setup, customizable monitoring, infrastructure dependency mapping, and integration with various cloud platforms like Azure and AWS.

With an extensive library of 1,200+ out-of-the-box monitoring templates, and more than 1,000 community templates, SAM makes it easy to monitor your private, public and cloud environments, servers (Linux or Windows) and applications like Office 365. It is also possible to deploy custom monitoring solutions using REST APIs, WMI, SNMP, and PowerShell scripts.

SAM features application dependency mapping and server capacity planning features, helping you monitor resource (CPU, RAM, storage, etc) usage on physical and virtual servers. Built-in capacity forecast charts and metrics help you identify when server resources reach warning and critical thresholds, with trending of peak and average capacity over time for more accurate forecasts.

Like other SolarWinds products, SAM is offered on a flexible licensing scheme, with subscription or perpetual licensing options. Price is quote-based. There is a fully functional 30-day free trial available. 

Zabbix

Zabbix is a comprehensive monitoring solution that covers the entire IT infrastructure stack, offering features such as flexible metric collection, smart problem detection, powerful alerting capabilities, extensive data visualization, seamless deployment options, enterprise-grade security, and unlimited scalability, all while being 100% open-source.

It can collect metrics from any source, including network devices, cloud services, OS level, databases, applications, IoT sensors, web pages, and supports industry-standard protocols. Using smart thresholds, trend prediction, and machine learning, it offers instant problem detection, with root cause analysis and correlation to help you quickly arrive at a solution.

With widget-based dashboards (with support for custom widgets), graphs, geo-maps, infrastructure maps, and scheduled reports, it offers comprehensive data visualization features, including support for multi-tenancy to isolate user groups and roles, allowing you to control access to features and data.

Zabbix integrates with various alerting systems, communication platforms, and webhooks, and customizable messaging channels, escalation scenarios, auto-remediation, and real-time export of detected problem events round-up a very complete monitoring package.

Zabbix is 100% Open Source, and you can use every feature free of charge. Technical support is offered in five tiers, each one with its own coverage limits and SLAs. Prices are only available by quote.

Datadog

Datadog offers comprehensive infrastructure monitoring with easy deployment, minimal maintenance, and extensive coverage, helping organizations achieve complete visibility into their IT environments and enhance security.

With complete coverage of any stack, including on-premise, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud environments, Datadog offers simple deployment and management without the need for extensive training and deep visibility into infrastructure performance, with real-time metrics, historical records, and troubleshooting tools.

Datadog allows you to choose which metrics to ingest and change your choice at any time, preserving the mathematical accuracy and granularity of your queries. It supports “tens of thousands” of metrics out-of-the-box, and keeps continuous historical records, with one-click correlation of metrics, traces, logs and security signals for quick troubleshooting.

Datadog is SaaS, with prices varying with the features that you want and subscription plan. IT Infrastructure Monitoring starts at US$ 15 per month, per host, on the Pro plan. There is a free plan that lets you monitor up to 5 hosts, but with data retention of only 1 day.

Nagios XI

Nagios XI is a comprehensive solution for monitoring IT infrastructure components with customizable features, scalability, and proactive alerts. It provides extensive monitoring of critical components, applications, and systems using the Open Source Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine.

Versatility is the main highlight of Nagios XI. Besides the many built-in features, this tool can be extended with “thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting functionality”, alongside multiple APIs that facilitate integration with in-house or third-party applications.

Configuration wizards, paired with management features such as Bulk Host Import, Auto Discovery, Auto Decommissioning, and Mass Acknowledgment, make setup easy, and configuration defaults let you revert changes to a previous working state with a single click. Nagios XI has advanced user management features and supports multi-tenancy, with safeguards to ensure users can only access the resources they are authorized to.

Nagios XI is available in two editions, “Standard” and “Enterprise”, with licenses for 100 nodes starting at US$ 2,495. There is a fully functional 30-day free trial. It only runs natively under Linux, more specifically distributions like CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, or Debian. However, it can be run on Windows servers using virtualization solutions like VMWare, Virtual Box, or Hyper-V.

NewRelic

New Relic is a monitoring solution that allows you to “monitor, debug, and improve your entire IT stack”, and can be used for Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Network Monitoring, Log Management, and much more.

There are over 600 ready-to-use integrations with popular tools and platforms, including cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), allowing for “dynamic observability of your entire infrastructure, from services running in the cloud or on dedicated hosts to containers running in orchestrated environments”

There is an “estate-wide warning system” that can track the status of hosts, applications, and events, with alerts on deviation from standard behavior. Host and configuration changes can be monitored to measure impact, and performance can be compared and correlated with change events for root cause analysis.

New Relic is SaaS with a complex pricing structure, based on the volume of data ingested (with 100 GB free each month), the subscription plan (basic, core, or full platform), and the number of users needed. There is also a “free forever” subscription tier, with no credit card required and access to 16 tools at “no extra charge”.

Conclusion

Like we said, there are many different kinds of IT Monitoring Tools, for many different needs. So, it makes sense to invest in a tool that can “cover all your bases” and monitor as many aspects as possible in a single place.

That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues. You will not only streamline your workflow, but also reduce costs with training and integration, for example.

This is why our favorite IT Monitoring Tool is Paessler PRTG, as it “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics. The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor not only your IT infrastructure, but also your network, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs. It really is a “Swiss army knife” of the monitoring tools.

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