Finding the Best IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools and Software for your Networks and Business is critical to in today’s complex and ever-growing eco-system of technology.

In fact, these tools are essential to ensure that networks never slow down or stop functioning when critical business and production applications need to be online.

Here is our list of the top IT Infrastructure monitoring tools:

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL A monitor that focuses on the statuses of network devices to check on network performance and includes operations thresholds that are linked to alerts. Installs on Windows Server.
2. Datadog IT Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL A cloud-based monitoring system that covers on-premises and cloud-provided servers and services.
   
3. Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL A monitor for networks, servers, and applications that cover all levels of IT infrastructure, including virtualizations. This is a cloud-based service.
4. ManageEngine OpManager Plus – FREE TRIAL A bundle of network and server management and monitoring tools that covers network devices, servers, storage systems, virtual infrastructure, and firewalls. Available for Windows Server and Linux.
5. PRTG Network Device Monitor – FREE TRIAL SNMP-driven network device monitoring as part of a wider package of network, server, and applications, monitoring services. Runs on Windows Server.
6. Progress WhatsUp Gold A network performance monitor that uses SNMP to check on network device availability and performance. Installs on Windows Server.
7. Nagios XI A combined network, server, and applications monitor that has thousands of free plug-ins available to extend it. Runs on Linux.

Generally speaking, these tools help you stay on top of your devices’ performance, allow you to add or remove devices, ensure constant availability and send alerts when something is likely to go wrong.

With such capabilities, your job becomes a lot easier and also, helps you to proactively secure and monitor the entire network.

The Top IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software & Tools of 2021:

Since monitoring tools are a critical part of your network and through it your business operations, many companies have come up with comprehensive infrastructure monitoring tools to assist you with your daily tasks.

Here’s a look at some of the Top IT Infrastructure Management software along with some of their features. Please Note: These are quick summaries of their capabilities and feature sets – Its best to choose the software you feel is most fitting for your needs and download their Free Trial and test it in your Network.

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is one of the well-known names in the world of infrastructure monitoring. It is a comprehensive tool that gives deep insights into the performance and availability of your network, round the clock.

It’s other salient features include but are Not limited to the following:

• Scalability to handle the growing size of your network.
• Multi-vendor network monitoring
• Network insights for some of the leading products such as Cisco ASA and F5 BIG-IP
• Integration with NetPath for critical path visualization
• Customizable dashboard to give a visual understanding of network data.
• Customizable alerts based on specific triggers, so you can have better control over what should trigger an alert.
• Comprehensive reports that provide all the necessary information in one place.
• Wireless network monitoring to identify dead zones and improve wireless coverage.
• Proactive monitoring to prevent security-related incidents
• Complete control over the health, availability and performance of any device on the network

As you can see, SolarWinds NPM is one of the Top Tools in the industry and has a feature set to back it up. They are very well rounded and Continue adding new features yearly to keep up with Software updates and Server Operating systems, as well as networking standards as well.

Price: Free 30 Day Free Trial – Contact Sales for an Accurate Quote

Official Download: Download a fully functional 30-day free trial at: https://www.solarwinds.com/network-performance-monitor/registration

2. Datadog IT Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL

Datadog IT Infrastructure Monitoring is a system that monitors applications and services and the servers that host them. This system is able to identify virtual infrastructure, such as hypervisors and virtual networks as well as software servers, such as Web, mail, and database servers. It will examine the resources of underlying hosts as well. The Infrastructure monitoring system is able to supervise on-premises and cloud-based resources, blending their activities into a unified system overview.

The Datadog IT infrastructure monitor is able to discover applications and services and populate the monitoring dashboard without the need for user intervention. It tracks all of your resources, no matter where they are, and starts monitoring them. The higher plan includes a Correlations service that creates an applications dependency map, which is ideal for root cause analysis.

Here are some of the benefits of the Datadog IT infrastructure monitoring strategy.

• A unified overview of all resources that offers drill-down detail for each service or application.
• Server availability and utilization monitoring.
• Customizable screen and performance thresholds.
• Log collection and performance tracing integrated into live performance monitoring.
• Capacity visualization and server management tools.
• Root cause analysis services for quick problem identification.
• Workflow integrations with Slack and Pagerduty.
• Monitor cloud services from AWS and Azure.
• Track virtualization performance and container activity.
• Integrations for more than 500 products
• Metrics retention for historical analysis
• Pre-formatted reports

Price: The Datadog Infrastructure Monitor is available in three editions: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. The Free service will monitor up to five hosts. The Pro edition costs $15 per host per month and includes all the standard infrastructure monitoring features. Higher services, such as application dependency mapping and AI-based threshold setting are reserved for the Enterprise plan, which costs $23 per host per month.

Official Download: For more information and to access a 14-day free trial, visit: https://www.datadoghq.com/dg/enterprise/it-infrastructure-monitoring/

3. Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring – FREE TRIAL

Site24x7 is a cloud-based service that supervises all aspects of a business’s IT infrastructure. It monitors the statuses of network devices and servers and also identifies throughput volumes of all equipment. The monitor tracks both on-premises, remote, and cloud-based resources and watches both physical and virtual systems.

Some key features are:

• A hosted service that includes processing, storage, and software maintenance.
• No setup costs, deposit requirements, or contract lock-in.
• Automatic device discovery.
• Constantly updated network inventory.
• Automatically drawn network topology map.
• SNMP-based network device monitoring.
• Traffic throughput monitoring.
• Network capacity planning support.
• Server audits.
• Server resource monitoring.
• Load source identification.
• Application performance tracing.
• Performance thresholds.
• Alerts for system problems.
• Problem notification by SMS, email, voice call, and instant messaging post.
• System and application log management.

Price: Site24x7 costs $9 per month when paid for annually. It is available for a 30-day free trial.

Official Download: https://www.site24x7.com/network-monitoring.html

4. ManageEngine OpManager Plus – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine OpManager Plus is a complete package for monitoring and managing infrastructure. It includes monitoring for network devices and the traffic that flows through them. It will watch storage servers and firewalls. On servers, it tracks all resource activities, services, and virtual infrastructure. The system includes a log manager and a configuration manager. It also has an IP address Manager and a switch port mapper.

Features of the OpManager Plus package include:

• Live device status reporting via the Simple Network Management Protocol.
• Network topology mapping.
• Tracking of wired, wireless, virtual, software-defined, And multi-site networks.
• Traffic sampling with NetFlow, IP-FIX, sFlow, J-Flow, NetStream, and AppFlow.
• A protocol analyzer.
• Virtualization monitoring for VMWare, Hyper-V, Citrix, and Nutanix.
• Log collection, consolidation, management, access, and analysis.
• IP address management, connecting through to native DHCP and DNS servers to form a DDI solution.
• Server monitoring.
• Network device configuration management for easy onboarding and security control.
• Firewall management.
• Tracking of Active Directory instances.
• Web server monitoring.
• Mail server monitoring.
• Storage system monitoring.
• Application dependency mapping.
• Switch port mapping.
• Status alerts.

Price: OpManager Plus is available on a perpetual license or on a subscription. The perpetual license starts at $3,791 to monitor 50 devices. The support package for that plan costs $758 per year. An annual subscription for the base pack costs $1,515 with support and maintenance included.

The application and storage monitoring features of OpManager Plus are implemented as a menu of plug-ins, each of which is charged for. You can get it on a 30-day free trial.

Download: ManageEngine OpManager Plus installs on Windows Server and Linux – download at: https://www.manageengine.com/it-operations-management/download.html

5. PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor from Paessler monitors all the traffic, devices and controllers within an IT infrastructure, to give a comprehensive picture of the network’s health at any given point in time.

Some of the features of this tool are:

• Comes with 10 different alerting tools such as email, push, alarm, audio files, SMS, HTTP requests and more.
• Has a fully-featured web interface based on AJAX standards
• Offers an enterprise console for native Windows applications.
• Apps are available for iOS and Android
• Allows fail-over tolerant monitoring, and a single fail-over is a part of every license.
• If the primary master of a cluster is down, another node takes over automatically.
• All nodes monitor all the sensors 24 X 7, so it’s possible to compare the response times of different locations within the same network.
• Makes it possible to create custom dashboards using the PRTG map designer. These dashboards can also be designed with custom HTML.
• Provides great-looking reports to get the right insights about network performance and availability.
• Comes in many languages such as English, French, Spanish, German, simplified Chinese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese and Portugese.

Price: The cost of PRTG network monitor depends on the number of sensors used.

• It is free for 100 sensors
• $1,600 for 500 sensors
• $2,850 for 1000 sensors
• $5,959 for 2500 sensors
• $10,500 for 5000 sensors

Other than sensor-based pricing, PRTG also offers two packages. The first one called XL1 Unlimited allows one core installation without any upper limit on the sensors, and this is priced at $14,500. The other option, called XL5 Unlimited, allows five core installations and costs $60,000.

Official Download: Down a 30-day free trial at: https://www.paessler.com/download/prtg-download

6. WhatsUp Gold

WhatsUp Gold from Progress allows you to proactively monitor your network and get instant visibility into the status of network devices.

Here’s a detailed look into its features.

• Provides visibility into applications, whether they are in the cloud or on-premises.
• Sends proactive notifications through email, SMS or Slack.
• Comes with custom dashboards to see the information you need.
• Has automated action policies to define state changes.
• Automatically creates a detailed interactive map of the entire network infrastructure.
• Actively monitors poll devices for a yes or no response.
• Supports protocols such as SNMP, WMI and SSH to track CPU and memory use.
• Sends alerts through email, SMS, Slack and web alerts.
• Exports reports in multiple formats.
• Comes with built-in and customizable monitoring profiles for SQL, Exchange and Active Directory.
• Performs audits to compare configurations against established practices.

Price:
There are three editions – Premium annual subscription, Premium license and Total Plus license. These are the differences between the three editions.

Description	Premium annual subscription	Premium license	Total Plus license
Network device and server monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automatic discovery	Yes	Yes	Yes
Interactive map	Yes	Yes	Yes
Availability and performance monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes
Alerts and notification	Yes	Yes	Yes
Customizable dashboard and reporting	Yes	Yes	Yes
Wireless network monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cloud and storage monitoring	Yes	Yes	Yes
Network traffic analysis	Add-on	Add-on	Yes
Application monitoring	Add-on	Add-on	Yes
Virtualization monitoring	Add-on	Add-on	Yes
Configuration management	Add-on	Add-on	Yes
Scalability pollers	Add-on	Add-on	Yes
Failover	No	Add-on	Add-on

You can download a free trial, or visit the site for more information: https://www.whatsupgold.com/

7. Nagios XI

Nagios XI is an enterprise server and network monitoring software that takes care of IT infrastructure monitoring.

Here are its features.

• A clean and user-friendly web interface.
• Advanced visual tools to know more about network incidents and for proactive monitoring.
• Capacity planning graphs that help organizations to plan for updates.
• Configuration wizards to setup monitoring with just a few clicks.
• Multi-user access to web interfaces to help users access status from anywhere.
• APIs help to extend the functionality of this tool.
• Central view of the entire IT infrastructure that includes processes and devices.

Price: The pricing starts at $1,995 for the standard edition and $3,495 for the enterprise edition. The standard edition comes with

• Configuration wizards
• GUI configuration
• Advanced reporting
• Enhanced visualizations
• Custom user dashboards
• Custom user views
• Executive summary report
• Custom actions
• Dashboard deployment
• Notification escalations.

You can buy the standard edition at https://www.nagios.com/products/nagios-xi/buy/?field353=Standard%20Edition%20-%20Included%20in%20Base%20Price

The enterprise edition comes with

• Scheduled reports
• Capacity planning reports
• Web-based server console access
• Bulk modification tools
• Audit logging
• Notification deployment
• SLA reports
• Scheduled pages
• Automated host decommissioning

You can buy the enterprise edition at: https://www.nagios.com/products/nagios-xi/buy/

Conclusion

In short, Enterprise-grade IT Monitoring Tools & Software are an absolute necessity in today’s complex world of networks. These tools come with a wide-range of features to suit the individual needs of every organization and this is why it greatly eases the work of network administrators.

We suggest downloading the a Tool from above that fits your criteria and give it a try in your network.