Networks are becoming critical components of business success – irrespective of whether you are small or BIG. Network monitoring software tools reduce network outages and allow businesses to operate more fluently, cut costs, and prevent revenue loss. If you’re a system or network administrator, you need monitoring tools.
There are open source and freeware server/network monitoring tools that will supervise your infrastructure for any issues that may arise. I want to introduce you to ten system and/or network monitors that do more than you’d think they could do. In this article, we have listed top 10 best free network monitoring tools. You will see a variety of server applications.
While compiling this list, it’s always a possibility that I missed some other great resources. Feel free to share it with us. You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well: Free WooCommerce WordPress Plugins, PHP Frameworks for Web Developers, Beautiful Scrolling Parallax Websites and Best Android Apps for Photographers.
1. Ganglia
Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.
2. NetworkMiner
NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows that can detect the OS, hostname and open ports of network hosts through packet sniffing or by parsing a PCAP file. NetworkMiner can also extract transmitted files from network traffic.
3. Nagios
Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes.
4. Cacti
Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box.
5. Capsa Free
Capsa Free is a must-have freeware network analyzer for Ethernet monitoring, troubleshooting and analysis. It provides users with great experience to learn how to monitor network activities, pinpoint network problems, enhance network security and so on.
6. Observium
Observium is an autodiscovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of hardware platforms and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp and many more.
7. Zabbix
Zabbix is a feature-packed monitoring tool. It has great visualization support including user-defined views, zooming, and mapping. It can send out alerts via email, SMS or instant message.
8. Pandora FMS
Pandora FMS is a performance monitoring, network monitoring and availability management tool that keeps an eye on servers, applications and communications.
9. Spiceworks
Spiceworks is becoming one of the industry standard free network/system monitoring tools. Although you have to put up with some ads, the features and Web-based interface can’t be beat. It also allows you to get social with fellow IT pros via the Spiceworks community, which is built right in.
10. Collectd
Collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information.
