BEST LAN Monitor: Top 10 LAN Network Traffic Monitoring Tools 2024

Curated List of Top LAN Monitor Tools with Features and Comparison. Select the BEST LAN Monitoring Software for Optimum Network Performance and Health:

A LAN Monitor is the application that scans the entire network to ensure that all the network devices are working as expected.

It generates alerts for suspicious activities on the network and provides a graphical or visual representation of data for your entire network. LAN monitoring is a must-do task for network administrators. It will help them to avoid the inconvenience of users.

How Does a LAN Monitor Tool Work?

LAN monitor checks the network devices to ensure that these devices are working fine. This tool can monitor a wide range of devices from the network-attached device to workstations or servers. You will be notified if any device has stopped responding.

Some tools make use of the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) protocol. It will fetch operational data like memory utilization or processor from the monitored devices. This will help the network administrators to know about the general health of the network.

Simple Network Management Protocol

[image source]

Our TOP Recommendations:

ManageEngine OpManager	Paessler GmbH
• Phone integration • Automated workflows • Push notifications	• Monitor entire LAN and WAN • Monitor all LAN devices & servers • Monitor bandwidth & traffic
Price: $495.00 annually Trial version: 30 days	Price: Fully Functional Trial version: 30 days
Visit Site >>	Visit Site >>

General Features of a LAN Monitor

LAN monitoring software will provide you graphical insights about your operating environment. It has features for automated warnings & alerts, checking file activities on key servers, keeping an eye on user activity, detection of suspicious activities, CPU utilization of Servers, Workstations, and Network appliances.

Benefits of LAN Monitoring Software Tool

Network Monitoring Software will provide you several benefits like:

• Staying ahead of outages.
• Faster fixing of issues.
• Identifying security updates.
• Justification of equipment upgrades.

	Best for	Platforms	Deployment	Free Trial	Price
AKIPS	Small to large businesses	Windows, Mac	SaaS, On-premise	30 days	Quote-based
Paessler GmbH	Small to large businesses.	Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows phone.	On-premises	Free trial available for an unlimited version for 30 days.	It is free up to 100 sensors. The price starts at $2149.
ManageEngine OpManager	Small to large businesses	Web-based, Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android	Cloud, Desktop, On-Premise, Mobile	30 days	Quote-based
Site24x7	Small to large businesses.	Windows, Linux and Web-based.	Cloud	Available for 30 days	Starts at $9 per month.
Nagios	Small to large businesses.	Windows, Mac, & Linux.	Cloud-hosted, No-premise, & Open API.	Available.	Nagios Core: Free. Nagios XI Standard:$1995. Enterprise: $3495.
Zabbix	Small to large businesses.	Web-based	Open API	—	Free and Open Source.
Cacti	Small to large businesses.	Cross-platform	Web-based tool.	—	Free.

Let’s Explore!!

#1) AKIPS

Best for small to large businesses.

Pricing: You’ll need to contact the AKIPS team for a custom quote. A 30-day free trial is also offered upon request.

AKIPS makes it to my list for two reasons. First, its scalability is remarkable. A single AKIPS server can be scaled to more than a million interfaces and 500 thousand flows each second. Secondly, the software is proactive. You can count on the software to alert you if any anomalies or faults are found so you can rectify the issue and keep your network protected 24/7.

Features:

• Robust Network Discovery
• Intelligent Polling
• Config Crawler
• Intuitive Events and Reporting Dashboard
• Site scripting
• Integrates seamlessly with relevant third-party solutions

Verdict: If you seek greater control and visibility over your network, AKIPS is a software you should try. It stands out for its remarkable scalability, proactive alerting system, and superior integration capabilities.

#2) Paessler GmbH

Best for small to large businesses.

Pricing: Paessler provides a free trial of the unlimited version of PRTG for 30 days. It is free up to 100 sensors. PRTG has six pricing plans i.e. PRTG 500 (Starts at $2149), PRTG 1000 (Starts at $2850), PRTG 2500 (Starts at $5950), PRTG 5000 (Starts at $10500), PRTG XL1 (Starts at $14500), and PRTG XL5 (Starts at $60000).

You will get one server installation, with each plan. Only PRTG XL 5 has 5 server installations.

PRTG is the network monitoring software that can monitor the whole IT infrastructure. It provides unified monitoring for network devices, bandwidth, servers, applications, virtual environments, remote systems, IoT, etc.

Features:

• It has ten built-in technologies for alerting, i.e. email, push, play alarm audio files, triggering HTTP requests, etc.
• For cluster failover solution, it supports failover tolerant monitoring. With the On-premises PRTG license, you will get a single failover.
• It can provide scheduled as well as on-demand reports.
• The hosted version of PRTG will allow you to monitor your LAN through remote probes.

Verdict: In-depth reporting by PRTG will help you to know about the numbers, statistics, and graphs of the monitoring data. Data is accessible on the desktop app or an app for iOS and Android devices.

#3) ManageEngine OpManager

Best for Small to large businesses.
Price: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise editions available. Contact for a quote.

OpManager gives you in-depth visibility into your LAN’s health, performance, and availability in real time. You can continuously monitor network services and visualize them using this tool. The tool is also excellent at fault management. You can filter unwanted events, correlate raw network events, and get alerts on the basis of the fault’s severity level.

Features:

• Network device monitoring
• Physical server monitoring
• Custom dashboard
• Workflow automation

Verdict: Easy to use and affordable, OpManager is a great tool to continuously monitor LAN for performance and fault assessment. The software lets you get to the root cause of what’s affecting your LAN’s performance and helps you effectively fix the issue.

#4) Site24x7

Site24x7 is an agentless, SNMP- and SaaS-based network monitoring tool that helps you easily identify the root cause of network performance issues by tracking key metrics such as CPU utilization, bandwidth usage, memory utilization, and response time.

With Site24x7, you can monitor the in and out traffic, packets, errors, and discards, and analyze the network performance based on actionable insights using the health dashboard.

Features:

• Auto-discover all devices within a provided IP range or whole network (LAN or WAN) using SNMP.
• Gain support from over 450 vendors like Cisco, Canon, Juniper, D-link, and Dell, and monitor devices from other vendors by just entering the SysOID.
• Use over 10,000 device templates with custom options that offer predefined attributes.
• View top devices based on response time, packet loss, and top interfaces based on traffic, bandwidth utilization, errors, and discards.
• Monitor network performance and network traffic from the same console.
• Generate instant alerts with processed SNMP traps.
• Map networks, monitor VoIP, process SNMP traps, support custom management information bases, and more.

Verdict: Site24x7 is a customizable, easily scalable, full-stack monitoring platform that offers everything enterprises and SMBs need to monitor their network infrastructure.

#5) Nagios

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: Nagios offers a free trial for Nagios XI. Nagios Core is a free and open-source solution. Nagios XI has two pricing plans i.e. Standard Edition (Starts at $1995) and Enterprise Edition (Starts at $3495).

Nagios can perform LAN monitoring for network connection problems, overloaded servers, and other devices. It can perform monitoring for LAN availability and the uptime of switches and routers.

Features:

• It mostly performs agentless monitoring using SNMP.
• It will immediately alert you for the down LAN segments.
• It will detect network outages and protocol failures at a fast rate.

Verdict: Nagios XI and Nagios Core will help you with router monitoring. Nagios has good reviews for monitoring functionalities but needs to improve the interface.

#6) Zabbix

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: It is a free and open-source platform.

Zabbix is an open-source network and application monitoring system. It can monitor the network, server, cloud, applications, and services. It will provide you distributed monitoring with unlimited scalability, high availability, and strong security.

Features:

• It has features of intelligent alerting and remediation.
• It provides advanced problem detection with trend prediction, anomaly detection, and problem forecasting.
• It provides a smart and highly automated metric collection with auto-discovery, out of the box templates, and agents for most of the platforms.

Verdict: This enterprise-class platform is an all-in-one solution for monitoring any kind of IT infrastructure, services, applications, and cloud resources. As per the customer reviews, it provides good network monitoring services.

#7) Cacti

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: Cacti is a free and open-source tool.

Cacti is a web-based and open-source tool for network monitoring and graphing. It is created for the RRDtool to work as a front-end application. RRD is an open-source data logging tool. The tool will help you with graphing the time-series data of various metrics like CPU load and network bandwidth.

Features

• Cacti has a fast poller.
• You will get advanced graph templating.
• It has multiple data acquisition methods.
• User management features.

Verdict: This tool is useful for LAN-sized installations as well as for complex networks of thousands of devices. It has good reviews for metrics monitoring.

#8) MRTG

Price: Free

MRTG stands for Multi Router Traffic Grapher. This tool can monitor SNMP network devices to provide you the pictures of traffic passed through each interface. MRTG is used for graphing of network devices along with other things like weather data and vending machines. It supports Windows, Linux, and Network systems.

Features:

• It is easy to set up and configure with the help of a provided set of the configuration tool.
• It makes use of SNMP implementation that is written in Perl. No external SNMP package is required to be installed.
• It provides graphics in PNG format.

Verdict: It can provide a visual representation of traffic for the last seven days, the last five weeks, or the last twelve months. This platform is not only for monitoring the traffic but also for any SNMP variable.

#9) ConnectWise Automate

Best for small and medium-sized businesses.

Price: ConnectWise provides a free trial for the product. You can get a quote for its pricing details.

ConnectWise Automate is a Remote Monitoring and Management platform. It is a cloud-hosted solution and supports the Windows platform. This platform will help you to know about the issues immediately. You will be able to automate the repeatable tasks.

Features:

• For remote control sessions, there will be a single source of monitoring.
• It supports monitoring of agent and agentless devices.
• Multiple hosts and virtual machine monitors will be provided by Virtualization manager for VMware(r) and Hyper-V(r).
• In addition to these monitoring features, ConnectWise Automate also has features for Discovery, management, patching, and automation.

Verdict: With the help of its management features, you can resolve the issues quickly and minimize the downtime. Its features like quick access to each endpoint will help you to resolve the issues and the patching features will help you to keep the customer’s devices secure and up to date.

#10) WhatsUp Gold

Best for medium to large businesses.

Price: WhatsUp Gold offers a free trial for the product.

WhatsUp Gold has three pricing editions i.e. Premium (Annual Subscription), Premium (License), and Total Plus (License). It has plans for Distributed edition, MSP edition, Network Admin Bundle, and Systems Admin Bundle. You can get a quote for any plan. As per the reviews, WhatsUp Gold pricing will start at $1755 as a one-time payment.

WhatsUp Gold provides an all-in-one network monitoring solution to monitor your entire infrastructure. It will give you visibility over the status and performance of applications, network devices, and servers. WhatsUp Gold provides in the cloud and on-premises deployment.

Features:

• WhatsUp Gold will provide a detailed interactive map of your complete network infrastructure using layer 2/3 discovery.
• It can provide real-time alerts for any device in WhatsUp Gold.
• It provides different views such as physical, virtual, wireless, and dependency. You can easily switch between the views to quickly resolve the issues.
• WhatsUp Gold REST API has a suite of calls that will allow you to integrate network monitoring data with the other systems.

Verdict: You will be able to get the details of your network on mobile phones through the WhatsUp Gold Mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

#11) Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4

Price: Get a quote.

Microsoft provides a protocol analyzer, Network Monitor 3. It can be used to capture, view, and analyze network data. This will help you with resolving the issues related to the application on the network.

Features:

• It supports 32-bit as well as 64-bit platforms.
• It provides support for network conversations and process tracking.
• It can capture Wireless Monitor Mode.
• Capture and parsing engine can be accessed through API.
• It also has features like a Script-based parser model (With frequent updates) and concurrent live capture sessions.

Verdict: Microsoft Network Monitor 3 supports Windows OS. Microsoft recommends not to run the system on production systems with an extra load.

#12) Obkio

Best for Small, Medium, and Large businesses and single users.

Price: It offers a free 14-day trial of all premium features and a free demo upon request. Once the trial has ended, you can continue using the free plan or upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $29/ month.

Obkio is a simple network performance monitoring SaaS solution that provides end-to-end visibility over your network to identify network problems in minutes.

Features:

• Deploys in minutes.
• Continuous monitoring using monitoring Agents.
• End-to-end monitoring to identify intermittent performance issues.
• Exchange of Synthetic Traffic to measure performance.
• Monitoring from the End-User perspective.
• Decentralized monitoring between pairs of agents in different locations.
• Real-time network performance updates every 500ms.
• Historical performance to troubleshoot past issues.
• Automatic Speed Tests to assess network health.
• User Quality of Experience (QoE) measured every minute.

#13) SolarWinds NPM

Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Solarwinds offers a free trial for 30 days. It’s pricing starts at $2995.

SolarWinds NPM will make sure that your network is running at peak performance. It works with networks of all sizes. For the availability of your core IT services and data center, you will get the details at a fast rate.

Features:

• The network is monitored proactively for the availability of routers, switches, and any other SNMP-enabled device.
• It will provide network alerts for network admins.
• It has the functionality to monitor and troubleshoot network devices.
• It will allow you to customize network alerts.

Verdict: You will get a visual representation of the health and performance of critical network gear. As per the reviews, the tool is customizable and easy to use.

Conclusion

Setting up a LAN monitor or taking a trial requires a lot of effort. Hence, here we have compared and reviewed the top 10 LAN monitoring tools in detail.

Also read =>> Top Network Administrator Tools

PRTG has more flexible plans. Its pricing is based on the number of sensors. Nagios provides two solutions i.e. Nagios XI and Nagios Core. Nagios Core is a free solution. If we compare the prices of the top three tools then PRTG has the lowest price and SolarWinds has the highest.

Out of the top ten LAN monitor tools, Zabbix, Cacti, and MRTG are free tools.

Hope this article will help you with finding the best LAN Monitor Software Tool for your infrastructure.

Review Process: Our writers have spent 15 hours researching for this article. Initially, we have shortlisted 25 tools then picked up the top 10 tools for your convenience.