Read this review and comparison of the top Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Services to select the best Infrastructure Monitoring Tool:
Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Services are solutions to help the engineering team with maintaining and optimizing the IT infrastructure through metrics, visualizations, and alerts.
These Infrastructure Monitoring solutions will improve operational efficiency and reduce downtime. They perform the tracking of performance metrics over the devices in the environment.
These solutions will give you system-wide insights into health, performance, and potential issues of the infrastructure.
Table of Contents:
Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
The below image shows the global IT Monitoring Tools Market:
[image source]
Pro Tip: A good Infrastructure Monitoring tool has the capabilities of automatically discovering the connected devices, creating custom dashboards, visual displays for network performance, alerts through email & SMS, and reports generation.Hence while selecting the Infrastructure monitoring tool or service you should consider the factors like ease of setup and use, scalability, remote access, intelligent alerting, clear & unified interface as well as dashboard.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Practices And Features
To leverage the tools and services you should follow the below practices:
The first step to follow is choosing the reliable IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Service provider. A reliable vendor partner will provide one-on-one assistance and consultation that will help you with configuring and getting the most value out of the solution.
Another step is configuring the software to get notifications on specific types of events. Determining the highest priority notification will alert the team for major incidents.
Configuring the comprehensive alert system will reduce the number of false positives. Reviewing baseline metrics and KPIs regularly will help you determine if any changes are required.
Dashboards can provide operational data, business insights, highlight abnormal events that can be security threats, etc. This data will be leveraged effectively if the dashboards are customized according to each role. Hence the right dashboard for the right people is a must.
A good solution must have these features:
Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Services will identify the issues in your infrastructure automatically. You can monitor your containers quickly. These solutions will let you see inside any stack, any app, at any scale, and anywhere.
Good solutions have features to find the underutilized cloud servers and on-premise servers. It saves operational costs by reducing the excess capacity based on the high-granularity historical data. It will help you by preventing the infrastructure costs from getting increased.
These tools and services will improve app reliability and collaboration across teams. It provides capabilities for diagnosing root causes faster, infrastructure metrics, application traces, logs, and communicating performance issues quickly.
The tool should be easy to set up, use, and understand. Without the assistance of professional services and training, one should be able to monitor the infrastructure.
List of Top Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
Here is the list of popular Infrastructure Monitoring Services:
- Auvik
- Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
- ManageEngine OpManager Plus
- Nagios
- Zabbix
- Checkmk
- Ipswitch WhatsUp® Gold
- Infopulse
- Dynatrace
- DatAvail
- Zenoss
- Datadog HQ
Comparison of Best Infrastructure Monitoring Services
| Tools | About Tool | Best For | Features | Free Trial | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Auvik | Network Management Software and Tools. | Streamlining and simplifying the network monitoring and troubleshooting. | Alerts, Live & Historic data, Syslog, VPN Monitoring, Internet connection check, etc. | Available | Get a quote for Essentials/ Performance. |
PRTG Network Monitor | All-in-one network monitoring tool. | Customizable, easy to use, and extendable solution. | Maps & dashboards, flexible alerting, transparent pricing, etc. | 30 days. | Free version & the price starts at $1750 for a perpetual license. |
ManageEngine OpManager Plus | Real-time IT infrastructure monitoring and management solution | End-to-end infrastructure monitoring from a single pane of glass | Firewall Management, Configuration and Compliance Management, Traffic and bandwidth management, and Application Management | 30 days | Quote-Based |
Nagios | Enterprise Network and Server Monitoring Software | Central solution for monitoring application, service, and network. | Proactive planning & awareness, Powerful Dashboards, etc. | Available | Standard Edition: $1995 & Enterprise Edition: $3495 |
Zabbix | Free & Open Source Tool for network & application monitoring. | Flexible and extendable data gathering. | Auto-discovery, templating, proactive network monitoring, etc. | No | Free. |
Checkmk | A solution to monitor the entire hybrid IT Infrastructure. | Getting visibility of your complex IT Infrastructure. | Powerful visualization, dynamic dashboard, etc. | Available. | It starts at $904. |
Let us review these tools and services in detail below.
#1) Auvik
Best for streamlining and simplifying network monitoring and troubleshooting.
Auvik offers a cloud-based network management solution. Its traffic analysis tools identify the anomalies faster. It can discover the distributed IT assets automatically. It gives you true visibility and control over the network.
It has functionalities for automating network visibility, IT asset management, configuration backup & recovery, etc. Monitoring the network performance and troubleshooting gets easier with this tool.
Features:
- Auvik has features for internet connection checking and provides insights on whether the connectivity issues are because of network or ISP.
- It performs the continuous monitoring and polling of your network. It provides access to the Live as well as historic data.
- It has VPN monitoring features that give you visibility on the VPN sessions in use.
- Syslog of all the network devices is centralized.
- It has pre-configured alerts and also allows you to customize the alerts.
Verdict: This monitoring software is easy to use. It provides cloud-based secure network management. It encrypts the network data with AES-256. Auvik has pre-configured monitoring alerts that will keep you notified proactively.
Price: Auvik offers the solution with two pricing plans, Essentials &Performance. You can get a price quote. A free trial is available for the solution. As per reviews, the price starts at $150 per month.
#2) Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
Best for customizable, easy-to-use, and extendable solution for IT Infrastructure monitoring.
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is a powerful and all-in-one solution to analyze the entire IT infrastructure. It has the capability of monitoring all the systems, devices, traffic, and applications in your IT infrastructure. Its mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices. It supports distributed monitoring and provides in-depth reporting.
Features:
- PRTG provides support to all important technologies such as WMI & Windows Performance Counters, SSH for Linux & Mac OS Systems, HTTP requests, etc.
- Its real-time maps facility will let you visualize your network and provide live status information.
- It has flexible alerting capabilities.
Verdict: PRTG is an all-in-one solution and you will not require any additional plugins or downloads. It is an easy-to-use solution and can be used by any sized business.
Price: A free trial of the platform is available for 30 days. It provides a free trial of an unlimited version. PRTG Network Monitor price starts at $1750 for a perpetual license. It also offers a free version.
#3) ManageEngine OpManager Plus
Best for End-to-end infrastructure monitoring from a single pane of glass.
OpManager Plus is a software that lets you monitor your entire network infrastructure in real-time. The tool basically helps you get total visibility over your entire network infrastructure. As such, IT teams can count on this tool to detect issues that could plague devices, routers, servers, etc. on your enterprise’s network.
The software’s excellent at helping you remove performance bottlenecks. OpManager Plus lets you monitor the performance of both cloud-based and on-premise applications on the infrastructure. It also helps you track over 100 physical and virtual servers. The software’s also great at auditing and reviewing firewall policies.
Features:
- Firewall Management
- Configuration and Compliance Management
- Traffic and Bandwidth Management
- IP Address and Switch Port Management
Verdict: With OpManager Plus, you get software that can perform in-depth IT infrastructure monitoring. It can easily support over 2000 metrics in more than 1000 devices. If end-to-end visibility over your network infrastructure is what you seek, then you’ll find plenty to love in OpManager Plus.
Price: Contact for a quote
Check our ManageEngine OpManager Detailed Review
#4) Nagios
Best for central solution for monitoring applications, services, and networks.
Nagios offers open-source tools for IT Infrastructure Monitoring. It has capabilities of IT monitoring, network monitoring, server monitoring, and applications monitoring. Nagios XI is a powerful and trusted tool for infrastructure monitoring. It is suitable for small to large businesses.
Nagios offers a platform that has an updated web interface and capabilities of advanced graphs & capacity planning.
Features:
- It can monitor all mission-critical infrastructure components such as applications, services, operating systems, network protocol, etc.
- All the in-house applications, services, and systems can be monitored through third-party add-ons.
- It provides automated and capacity planning graphs to help businesses with planning infrastructure upgrades.
- Nagios has multi-tenant capabilities and extendable architecture.
Verdict: It has a powerful dashboard that provides monitoring information and third-party data at-a-glance. With this tool, you will get a central view of your entire IT operations network and business processes.
Price: Nagios offers the solution with two editions, Standard Edition ($1995) and Enterprise Edition ($3495). A free edition is also available that is suitable for small environments.
#5) Zabbix
Best for flexible and extendable data gathering.
Zabbix is an open-source solution for network and application monitoring. It has tools for all types of IT infrastructure, services, applications, resources, etc. Zabbix 5.2 has capabilities of Synthetic Monitoring and IoT monitoring. It can detect anomalies and system misbehavior.
Zabbix will send alerts on the detection of anomalies. It’s security and authentication features will protect data on all levels.
Features:
- Zabbix has features for creating powerful insights.
- It provides features of flexible user roles for controlled access to Zabbix user operations and API methods.
- It will let you save named complex-filters with a facility to re-use them.
- For metric collection, it uses various methods such as multi-platform Zabbix agent, SNMP & IPMI agents, Agentless monitoring of user services, custom methods, calculation & aggregation, and end-user web monitoring.
- For problem detection, it has highly flexible definition options.
Verdict: This enterprise-level software can perform the real-time monitoring of servers, virtual machines, and network devices for a lot of metrics. It is an open-source tool. Zabbix has a native web-based interface that will provide a visual overview of your IT environment through graphs, network maps, slideshows, etc.
Price: Zabbix is available for free.
#6) Checkmk
Best for getting visibility of your complex IT Infrastructure.
Checkmk is a tool for infrastructure and application monitoring. It is an open-source and scalable platform. It has the capabilities of monitoring applications, servers, and networks. It has a wide range of features and can be used for complex IT environments. The platform will let you automate the monitoring.
Checkmk is a platform with functionalities of Infrastructure Monitoring, Log & event Monitoring, Availability & SLA Reporting, etc.
Features:
- Powerful agent-based monitoring and agentless monitoring.
- It has a collection of more than 1800 plugins.
- Checkmk has dynamic dashboards.
- It provides powerful visualizations.
Verdict: Checkmk is easy to configure, and it is a flexible tool. It has a flexible and real-time dashboard. It has an advanced notification system with various integrations. Its automatic configuration system is modern and efficient.
Price: Checkmk offers the Enterprise Edition, which has the Standard solution for companies as well as Managed Services for managed service providers. You can choose either of them. Standard Solution will cost you $904 and Managed services will cost you $1773.10 including tax. A free trial is available for the tool.
#7) Ipswitch WhatsUp® Gold
Best for troubleshooting faster through features like interactive topology map.
WhatsUp® Gold is a Network Monitoring application that can be used to monitor the availability and performance of cloud and on-premise infrastructure. It provides complete visibility of network devices, systems, and applications. It makes use of topology-aware monitoring and hence is able to understand network dependencies. It provides intelligent alerts or notifications through SMS, email, web, or slack.
WhatsUp® Gold will let you integrate to other systems through a powerful REST API and automate the workload.
Features:
- WhatsUp® Gold has features to automatically discover & map the entire network.
- It has a dependency-aware network monitor.
- It provides a facility to export the reports or schedule report runs for sharing with your team and management.
Verdict: WhatsUp® Gold is a network performance monitor with a dependency-aware network monitor. It has a customizable dashboard. The platform can automatically discover and map the entire network.
Price: You can try the platform for free and get a quote for pricing details.
#8) Infopulse
Best for providing the support and services of Infrastructure Monitoring 24/7.
Infopulse provides the 24/7 services of IT Infrastructure Monitoring. It follows an SLA-based operational model that can detect systems’ downtime at early stages. Infopulse services are available to protect business-critical systems.
The Infrastructure Monitoring Services that are available with Infopulse are Monitoring Operations and Service Desk. Its Operations monitoring services will ensure the 24/7 availability of IT infrastructure.
Features:
- Infopulse Services will proactively monitor the website, cloud, servers, real users, etc.
- This service will give prompt detection, classification, and resolution of alerts and incidents, etc.
- Its Service Desk is a single point of contact and provides business processes support.
Verdict: Infopulse provides scheduled maintenance procedures & routine execution, proactive infrastructure performance measurement, and reporting & tracking incidents status. Infopulse provides services to small to large businesses. It has expertise with various tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Pingdom, etc.
Price: You can get a quote for pricing details.
#9) Dynatrace
Best for intelligent observability across cloud and hybrid environments.
Dynatrace Infrastructure Monitoring platform will provide automatic and intelligent observability over the cloud and hybrid environments. It performs the continuous auto-discovery of hosts, VMs, Cloud Services, network, logs, etc. It is a platform with continuous automation, AI-assistance, cross-team collaboration, and user experience & business analytics.
Features:
- Automatic monitoring of all your infrastructure including cloud, hybrid, servers, storage, VMs, etc.
- It provides advanced observability over PaaS and container technologies.
- It can be integrated with the ITSM solution for automating incident management.
Verdict: Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform and Infrastructure Monitoring is a part of it. This all-in-one platform has capabilities of cloud automation, infrastructure monitoring, applications & microservices, etc.
Price: A free trial is available for the platform. Its full-stack monitoring price starts at $69 per month per 8GB host. Infrastructure monitoring price starts at $21 per month per 8GB host. Digital experience monitoring price starts at $11 per month for 10K digital experience monitoring units. All these prices are for annual billing.
#10) DatAvail
Best for providing 24*7*365 monitoring, alerts, diagnostics, remediation, tools, and platforms.
DatAvail provides the 24*7*365 IT Infrastructure Monitoring services. It provides the services to monitor and manage all the elements of your enterprise IT infrastructure. It can monitor and manage domestic & global networks, systems, applications, security, and storage. It will provide alerts, diagnostics, and remediation.
DatAvail provides monitoring services with support for all major operating environments and technologies such as Linux, Windows & Hyper-V, UNIX, Azure & Azure Stack, etc.
Features:
- For IT Infrastructure Monitoring, the available Services and Tools are RIM, RIM+, on-premise monitoring, cloud-based infrastructure monitoring, cloud application monitoring, and APM & Monitoring.
- It offers services for Network performance monitoring & Diagnostics, compliance monitoring services, IT Security monitoring, and Enterprise OS & Systems monitoring.
- DatAvail provides 24*7 monitoring & diagnostics and onshore & offshore capabilities.
- It has ISO270001 Standards certified employees.
Verdict: DatAvail IT Infrastructure Monitoring Services are available for 24*7*365 and provides peak system performance and operational reliability.
Price: You can get a quote for pricing details.
#11) Zenoss
Best for performing full-stack monitoring and AIOps at any scale.
Zenoss offers an intelligent platform for application and service monitoring. It has capabilities for full-stack SaaS-based monitoring. It has the power of AIOps. It provides complete visibility into every environment, simple as well as complex infrastructures. It has advanced infrastructure monitoring capabilities.
Zenoss featured monitoring capabilities include functionalities to monitor servers, networks, application and software layers, and cloud resources like Google Cloud Platform.
Features:
- Zenoss has the capabilities to perform advanced monitoring for every cloud-based, physical, and virtual resource.
- It provides comprehensive health metrics and deep insights into performance.
- It is a platform with capabilities of predictive analytics, intelligent automation, application performance optimization, and immediate root-cause analysis.
Verdict: Zenoss provides a platform with one centralized console to perform advanced monitoring of every physical, virtual, and cloud-based resource. It will give you unparalleled health and performance insights. Zenoss will help you with optimizing your unique IT infrastructure.
Price: You can get a quote for pricing details. A free trial is available for the platform.
#12) Datadog HQ
Best for the unparalleled breadth of coverage for monitoring.
Datadog’s modern infrastructure monitoring platform will monitor the health and performance of your entire infrastructure in one place. It will give you complete visibility of your infrastructure performance.
With this tool, you will be able to get a bird’s-eye view of your cloud and on-premise servers. It will have a wide range of coverage, minimal maintenance, and effortless deployment. It provides enterprise-grade security with all plans.
Features:
- Datadog offers a one-click correlation of metrics, traces, and logs so you can troubleshoot issues faster.
- Intuitive interface, (no query language required), so you can start monitoring in minutes, without requiring professional services or extensive training.
- It can showcase highly granular turn-key and custom metrics in real-time> It has customizable dashboards.
- It’s auto-generated host map feature will help you with discovering underutilized cloud servers and on-premise servers.
- Datadog’s more than 400 vendor-backed integrations will help you with monitoring cloud services, on-premise servers, containers, databases, etc. in one place.
- It provides full-resolution data retention for a limited period.
Verdict: Datadog will let you view infrastructure metrics, application traces, and logs in a single pane of glass. It has more than 400 vendor-backed integrations. This monitoring tool is simple to deploy and easy to manage.
Price: Datadog offers a free trial of all their features for 14 days. For Infrastructure monitoring, it offers three plans, Free, Pro ($15 per host per month), and Enterprise ($23 per host per month).
Conclusion
IT Infrastructure contains servers, networks, computer hardware, storage, etc. IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Services will help the businesses with finding operational issues, security breaches, etc. This gives an effective and efficient way to address the cause of performance issues.
Datadog is our top recommended solution for Infrastructure Monitoring. Zabbix is a completely free tool. Datadog, PRTG, and Nagios offer a free plan, and Checkmk, Zabbix, and Nagios are open-source tools.
We hope this detailed review article will help you with choosing the right Infrastructure Monitoring Tool or Service for your business.
Research Process:
- Time taken to research and write this article: 26 Hours.
- Total tools researched online: 28
- Top tools shortlisted for review: 11