8 Best Router Monitoring Tools for 2023 - plus Free Downloads & Trials!

The necessity of Router Monitoring Software & Tools is crucial to understand the strain and capacity your networking devices are under in order to forecast and plan correctly for expansion. Using a Switch or Router monitor helps you understand security issues, network outages, connectivity issues and much more.

Over the last decade, networks have grown rapidly to connect a multitude of devices across different locations.

This trend is only going to grow and become more complex as we usher in the era of Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Wearables. Such complexity has also opened up many loopholes for criminals to steal data, enter their malicious code and tamper with the network as a whole.

In such a situation, it is important to stay on top of everything that’s happening in the network, so any breach can be identified and fixed at the earliest. Also, network admins should know the connections between various devices and nodes, including their distribution and access.

To be on top of all these aspects, you need a good network monitoring software that will monitor your routers, switches and firewalls as well. But before going into the different monitoring tools, let us briefly look at some protocols that are used to monitor router traffic, so you can make an informed choice when it comes to router monitoring tools.

Router Monitoring Protocols

Many protocols are used to monitor your routers and the communication that passes through it. Some of the important ones are listed below:

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) This is one of the most basic methods of collecting data, and can be used to monitor the bandwidth usage of routers and switches as well as collecting device values for different metrics such as CPU use and memory.
Sflow A protocol that can be embedded in any device to get continuous statistics on any OSI layer.
Netflow Cisco’s proprietary technology that gathers data from devices and sends them to a Netflow analyzer.
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) A TCP/IP network layer protocol that is used for sending error messages and operational information about routers.
JFlow JFlow is a technology developed by Juniper and it samples packets in the input stream of routers.
IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) A standard that determines how IP flow information should be formatted and sent from the exporter to collector.

Manufacturers of Firewalls & Routers

Now that you know the different protocols, let us also look at some major manufacturers of firewalls and routers.

Cisco
Dell
Juniper
Hewlett Packard
Huawei
Arista
VMware
Riverbed
Netscout
Linksys
Netgear

Next, lets go in depth into the different router monitoring tools and softare and look at their features, so you can decide which works best for you.

Here’s the Best Router Monitoring Tools

Here are some of the most popular router monitoring tools.

Let us take a detailed look into each of these products and see how they compare to each other and how they can monitor your networking devices for you!

1. SolarWinds Network Insights for Cisco ASA with (NPM) – FREE TRIAL

Network Insights by SolarWinds is a tool from SolarWinds that comes with Network Performance Monitor, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer or Network Configuration Manager. SolarWinds is a leader in the world of network monitoring. It is a comprehensive tool that gives deep insights into the working of firewalls and routers.

Key Features: The features of Network Insights include:

Monitors firewalls continuously to ensure that services dependent on these firewalls are not affected in any way.
Gives the performance and health of firewalls in a single page.
Automates the monitoring process to reduce manual intervention and the errors associated with it.
Provides the status of VPN tunnels to ensure uninterrupted connectivity between sites.
Automatically discovers ACLs their zones and interfaces.
Detects shadow and redundant rules without the need for manual operations.
Improves operational efficiency.
Backs up and restores configuration files for each context.

Price: 30-day Free Trial!

Download: A free 30-day fully-functional trial software is available at https://www.solarwinds.com/npm-ncm/registration

2. ManageEngine OpManager

ManageEngine OpManager is a powerful and user-friendly network monitoring software that monitors a whole lot of devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, servers and virtual machines for their performance.

Key Features: Some features of OpManager are:

Monitors network with more than 2000 performance metrics
Comes with intuitive dashboards, instant alerts and intelligent reporting
Sends critical information on router performance based on a wide-range of metrics such as voltage, temperature, buffer statistics and more.
Monitors switch ports as well.
Continuously checks for the availability, performance and latency of WAN links.
Checks for VoIP call quality and troubleshoots poor VoIP performance.
Automatically discovers devices and maps them.
Points out any network degradation or outages, so the same can be fixed right away.
Monitors servers across multiple vendors.
Provides agentless monitoring of virtualized servers.
Sends alerts through emails and SMS.
Gives the option to automate first level network fault troubleshooting.
Tracks network bandwidth usage in real-time and ensures that business critical applications get the highest priority when it comes to bandwidth usage.
Schedules configuration backups when needed
Monitors the performance of applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Scales easily to accommodate up to 10K devices and ensures their availability.

Price: Contact the sales team at https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/get-quote.html to get a quote.

Download: You can download a fully functional free trial version from https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/download.html

3. WhatsUp Gold

WhatsUp Gold is a network monitoring tool from Ipswitch, that gives completely visibility into the status and performance of your applications, routers, firewalls, servers and other network devices. It monitors devices and applications hosted both in the cloud and on premises.

Key Features: The features of WhatsUp Gold are listed below.

Gives a detailed interactive map of your entire networked infrastructure.
Sends proactive alerts, so you can fix issues before they impact your network.
Comes with easy-to-use dashboards, customizable maps and custom reports.
Monitors Windows, Apache, Java and other custom applications.
Ensures the performance of business critical applications
Supports the compliance requirements of many standards such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI DSS.

Price: Get a quote from the sales team at https://www.whatsupgold.com/quote/

Download: Download a free trial version from https://www.whatsupgold.com/trial/

4. Nagios

Nagios is a free and open-source application to monitor systems, networks, devices like routers and switches, and the infrastructure as a whole.

Key Features: Nagios comes with the following features.

Comes with powerful script APIs to monitor both in-house and custom applications, services and systems.
Gives a centralized view of the entire IT infrastructure.
Automatically restarts failed applications and services through event handlers.
Helps with capacity planning
Excellent alerting system ensures that alerts reach the right people.
Gives detailed status information through a web interface.
Extensive reporting capabilities support third-party add-ons as well.
Supports multi-tenant capabilities
Scales to monitor thousands of devices
Failover capabilities ensure that critical applications are always up and running
Hundreds of community developed add-ons extend the functionality of Nagios.

Price: It is 100% FREE

Download: You can download Nagios from https://www.nagios.org/downloads/

5. Zenoss

Zenoss is a unified monitoring software created to monitor the complex network environments and the multitude of firewalls, routers and other devices that are a part of it. Also, the core engine is open-source.

Key Features: The key features of Zenoss are:

Works well on cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments.
Dynamic dashboards give a snapshot of all the information, and can be shared with other team members for increased collaboration.
Proactively identifies anomalies in the performance of different devices, so they can be fixed at the earliest.
Uses big data to display information in real-time, along with an in-depth analysis.
Balances load well across different devices.
A well-developed control center helps with management and administration.
Configuration settings can be applied or rolled back quickly on any part of the platform.
Provides high visibility into critical resources.
Comes with built-in backup and restoration procedures

Price: It is 100% Free

Download: You can download or schedule a demo of this software at https://ownit.zenoss.com/features.html#getstarted

6. PRTG Router Monitoring – FREE TRIAL

An all-in-one router monitoring tool from Paessler PRTG helps you stay on top of the health and performance of your routers, so your company’s communication and workflow is not impacted in any way.

Key Features: Some important features of this router monitoring tool are as follows.

Checks bandwidth consumption and network traffic on your routers.
Monitors router through SNMP, Netflow, sflow, jflow and packet sniffer
Detects suspicious traffic
Sends an alert when routers are overloaded
Supports routers from most major manufacturers like Cisco, Linksys and Netgear.
Monitors not just the router, but also computer fans, temperatures, power supply sources and memory of routers.
Gathers information about the bandwidth consumption of individual connections, network activities, causes of traffic and router error messages.
Simple to configure and easy to use.
You can setup custom alarms to get notifications of router errors and overloads.
Works well with many mobile devices.
Supports many languages such as English, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, German and French

Price: Cost depends on the number of sensors you want to use. The first 100 sensors are free. If you want more than this free limit, here is the pricing.

500 sensors, 1 server installation – $1600
1000 sensors, 1 server installation – $2850
2500 sensors, 1 server installation – $5950
5000 sensors, 1 server installation – $10500
Unlimited sensors, 1 server installation – $14500
Unlimited sensors, 5 server installations – $60000

Download: A free trial version can be downloaded from https://www.paessler.com/download/prtg-download?download=1

7. OpenNMS

OpenNMS is another open-source monitoring platform that is developed and supported by a community of users. It comes in two versions – Horizon and Meridian. Out of the two, Horizon is the platform where innovations happen quickly and works well for monitoring new technologies or devices. Meridian, on the other hand, is ideal for businesses that are looking for long-term support and stability.

Key Features: The features of OpenNMS are:

Detects service outage quickly.
Provides out-of-the-box support for many applications and devices
Gives the option to monitor applications remotely.
Collects performance metrics through a variety of industry-standard protocols.
Uses flexible and extensible architecture.
Built on event-driven architecture, so you can have better control over events in your network.
Automatically discovers layer 2 network topologies based on SNMP information.

Price: It is 100% Free

Download: OpenNMS can be downloaded from https://www.opennms.org/install

8. Zabbix

Zabbix is a popular network monitoring tool that works well for all kinds and sizes of IT infrastructure, services, applications and resources.

Key Features: Features of Zabbix are as follows.

Collects metrics from any device, application or system.
Detects problem states from the incoming metric flow automatically, so there is no need to look into these metrics all the time.
Provides an extensive root cause analysis
Predicts trends and detects anomalies quickly.
Native web interface gives a visual overview of the entire IT environment.
Offers extensive drill-down reports, network maps and slideshows.
Sends alerts to the concerned person with custom messages
Automatically fixes first level issues
There is a strong encryption between all Zabbix components.
Comes with a flexible user permission schema
Code is open for security audits.
Automatically discover devices within a network
Scales well without any limits
Integrates well with many third-party applications

Price: Since it is open source, it is free.

Download: You can download Zabbix from https://www.zabbix.com/download

Conclusion

To conclude, monitoring Routers and switches is important to prevent any data breaches and down time, and at the same time, to get an exact idea of the state and performance of every device on the network. Many Router Monitoring tools and Software are available today, and they use a varying list of protocols to monitor the routers and firewalls of all leading manufacturers.

Though the exact choice depends on your requirements, network size and system configuration, all the above mentioned tools are great choices – We suggest you download a few of them, as they all have free trials, to get a better feel of how they work!

Router Monitoring Software & Tools for Port/Interface Management & Bandwidth/Traffic Analysis