15 Best FREE Network Monitoring Tools & Software (2022)
Network monitor software and tools allow you to efficiently monitor and manage your network. Your network is a complex mix of hardware, software, and human elements. A network monitoring tool will give you a broad view of your network’s health and help you identify areas of improvement.
Network testing tool helps system admin or network administrator for monitoring potential problems. There are a plethora of Network monitoring tools available in the market, and choosing one is difficult.
Here is a curated list of Top 15 network monitoring tools for monitoring devices, services, ports, protocols, and analyzing traffic on your network. This list contains open-source (free) as well as paid tools. Read more…
Top Free Network Monitor Software
| Name | Free Trial | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 👍 Network Bandwidth Analyzer | 30-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| 👍 Auvik | 14-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| ManageEngine OpManager |
30-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| Site24x7 | 30-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| Network Configuration Manager | 30-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| Datadog | 14-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
| Obkio | 14-Days Free Trial | Learn More |
1) Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Network Bandwidth Analyzer is a multi-vendor network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor the network’s performance. Detecting, diagnosing, resolving the network performance issues allows you to use the network more effortlessly.
Key features:
- Quickly detects, diagnoses, and resolves the network performance issues, reducing the network outrages.
- Easily view IPv4 and IPv6 flow records.
- You can easily Monitor Cisco NetFlow, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, Huawei NetStream, and IPFIX flow data identifying the applications and protocols consuming the most bandwidth.
- Immediately shows alerts if there is any change in the application traffic activity.
- Easily set alerts if the network monitoring software stops sending you network performance data.
- The Analyzer collects all the traffic data and converts it into a useable format by which you can easily monitor the network traffic.
- VMware vSphere distributed switch support, by which it can filter out east-west traffic on specific hypervisors.
- Just dragging and dropping the network performance metrics on a common timeline accelerates the process of identifying the root cause.
- The software supports the Cisco NBAR2, which provides visibility into HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) traffic without additional probes, spanning ports, etc.
- Easily create a schedule, and deliver in-depth network traffic analysis and bandwidth reports.
- This is one of the best free network monitoring tools which supports wireless network monitoring and management.
- With CBQoS policy optimization, you can measure the effectiveness of pre-and post-policy traffic levels per class-map
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| This SolarWinds network performance monitor is easy to use | Does not have strong integration with 3rd party products. |
| This networking monitoring tool for windows offers flexible deployment options | |
| You can create customizable network traffic reports. | |
| With port 0 monitoring, you can easily increase the security by having visibility into malicious or malformed traffic. |
Free trial: Yes, 30 days fully functional trial.
30-Days Free Trial
2) Auvik
Auvik is a faster, easy-to-use, cloud-based network monitoring software giving you instant insight into the networks you manage with automated network discovery, monitoring, documentation, and much more. This networking performance monitor tool provides real-time network mapping and inventory, keeping you constantly updated.
Key features:
- The software runs on Windows Server and Ubuntu Linux.
- This network performance monitoring tool provides a dashboard that displays all your activities.
- It gives alerts immediately when unusual activity occurs.
- The software contains a SaaS package that includes a processing power and storage area for monitoring software and system logs as well.
- Provides secure SSH access via an in-app terminal
- It completely centralizes the monitoring of networks available on multiple sites.
- Allows you to create powerful workflows with its APIs
- It provides auto-discovery services.
- Its lightweight collector takes just a few minutes to install, and on its installation, it immediately begins to discover the network devices.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| It supports both Windows Server and Ubuntu Linux. | It is not compatible with any other auviks modules. |
| Collects the data in real time | No path capacity analysis across links. |
| Automatically backups all the activities, which can be accessed in the future. | |
| You can easily access it from anywhere via any standard web browser. | |
| It includes configuration management. | |
| It gives an unlimited number of endpoints. |
Free trial: Yes, 14 days free trial
14-Days Free Trial
3) ManageEngine OpManager
OpManager is an end-to-end network management software. It enables you to screen network availability, traffic, performance metrics of various devices, including routers, servers, switches, etc.
Key features:
- Allows you to monitor multi-vendor network devices’ performance.
- It offers real time monitoring.
- Actively manage the physical servers like VMs, RAID, storage arrays, etc.
- Over 9500 built-in monitoring templates for network devices.
- Advanced notifications and alerts are sent to you via E-mails and SMS.
- With 100+ performance widgets, you can custom dashboard
- Easily manage the network with your mobile app
- Contextual integrations for all-in-one network infrastructure monitoring
- Effectively monitor WAN/VoIP for jitter, packet loss, and latency.
- It provides an automated troubleshooting feature.
- It has an SSL offload
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| Uptime reporting | It is a feature-rich tool that will require a time investment to learn properly. |
| Real-time monitoring | |
| The network is accessible through mobile | |
| Multi-user collaboration |
Free trial: yes, 30-days free version
30-Days Free Trial
4) Site24x7
It is a robust and stable network monitoring tool that gives you an insight at the device and interface level. It is a SaaS-based all-in-one monitoring solution for DevOps and IT.
Key features:
- Its network monitoring solution is SNMP-based.
- It monitors the network devices’ health, performance, and availability.
- It is one of the best network monitoring tools that offer multi-vendor support, and a cloud-based network monitoring tool
- Offers 24×7 monitoring of the network in real-time.
- The monitoring is done without any interruptions due to the high availability mechanisms used in it.
- It’s a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) based network that allows you to detect anomalies immediately.
- It contains a root cause analysis feature.
- Offers a complete network mapping with layer 2 maps giving you full visibility.
- Contains features like custom monitoring, cloud-based scalability, dashboards, etc.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| It has a mobile version supported by Android and iOS. | It has many features, making it time captivating to understand it fully. |
| Network monitoring is done 24×7 | |
| It supports over 450 vendors like Canon, HP, Cisco, D-link, Dell, etc. | |
| Uses real-time data to discover devices. | |
| User-friendly network monitoring tool |
Free trial: yes, 30-days free trial
30-Days Free Trial
5) Network Configuration Manager
The network configuration management software helps in saving time and improving the network security and reliability by managing configurations, compliance for routers, switches, and other networks, etc.
Key features:
- Ensure high network reliability and uptime with automated backup schedules for routers, firewalls, and switches.
- Offers fully automated configuration for most managed network devices.
- You can easily view, deploy, track, and backup all the network device configurations from one location.
- Provides a fast and error-free execution of configuration changes.
- You can identify the differences in lines of code with the configuration comparison feature.
- It maintains the configuration database, which can help you in the future with security misconfigurations.
- Efficiently manage the routers and avoid security misconfiguration.
- Easily create multi-device-based baseline configurations giving you a reference point.
- Through the proactive drift management feature, you can improve operational efficiency.
- With a network inventory tool, you can increase productivity and save time.
- Import existing devices, irrespective of the device type, and automatically update your device information whenever it changes.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| It is a multi-vendor inventory software | It is challenging to track all the changes in tools. |
| It quickly resolves network issues. | |
| Simplify and improve your network compliance | |
| It automatically identifies vulnerabilities and leverages them. | |
| It is compatible with other SolarWinds modules. |
Free trial: Yes,30- days free trial
30-Days Free Trial
6) Datadog
Datadog, the monitoring software, provides you end-to-end visibility into the cloud or hybrid networks. It administers the performances of network devices. It is a cloud-based software that explores and detects all the connected devices.
Key features:
- It has a watchdog feature that autonomously finds any anomalies in your network.
- It offers live network mapping.
- This network performance monitoring tool allows monitoring for remote access to sites.
- It analyses network traffic as it flows through applications, availability zones, on-premise servers, etc.
- It quickly identifies cross-pod communication issues
- It collects SNMP device reports.
- Gathers performance data from many information sources.
- Accelerates troubleshooting by recognizing performance dependencies.
- You can effortlessly monitor traffic health between any two endpoints of the app, IP, port, etc.
- It gives you deep visibility into its DNS performance.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| Instantly create and customize the graphs, metrics, and alerts. | Doesn’t automatically include NetFlow data |
| Its interface is intuitive | |
| 500+ vendor-backed integrations. | |
| It shows all the changes made in the network in near real-time. | |
| The auto-discovery builds a network of topology maps. |
Free trial: Yes, 14-day free trial
14-Days Free Trial
7) Obkio
Obkio’s Network performance monitoring and SaaS solution software helps you to identify the issues and resolve them to deliver an improved end-user experience. It is one of the best network monitoring tools that provide real-time network performance updates every 500ms
Key features:
- Continuous monitoring using monitoring Agents
- Exchange of Synthetic Traffic to measure performance
- Monitoring from the End-User perspective
- Decentralized monitoring between pairs of agents in different locations
- This network performance monitoring tool provides historical performance to troubleshoot past issues
- Automatic Speed Tests to assess network health
- User Quality of Experience (QoE) is measured every minute
- Enable SNMP device monitoring so that you can monitor firewalls, CPU, switches, routers, and much more.
- SaaS application allows storing information in the cloud, making it useful and easy to set up.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| Deploys in minutes | Does not offer a wider range of Integrations |
| Troubleshoot intermittent performance issues. | |
| The monitoring agents are supported by every system, Windows, Linux, Hyper-V, and more. | |
| In places with no IT servers, you can use hardware agents available in plug-and-play. | |
| web and mobile app is available |
Free trial: 14- day free trial
14-Days Free Trial
8) Paessler PRTG
PRTG network monitoring software is known for its advanced infrastructure management capabilities. Its user interface is very powerful and is the best fit for organizations with low experience in network monitoring. This is one of the best free network monitoring tools that supervises the entire IT infrastructure using advanced technologies like SNMP, WMI, HTTP requests, Pings, SSH, and much more.
Key features:
- Completely monitors all the devices, systems, and traffic in your IT infrastructure.
- This free networking monitoring software supports multi-site capabilities.
- Comprises of SNMP sensors that gather device health information
- The Ping feature enables you to check the device’s health information.
- It contains extra sensors to monitor servers and applications.
- It monitors specific datasets from your database with individually configured PRTG sensors.
- Entirely manages and provides detailed statistics of all the applications running in your network.
- Monitors all the servers in real-time with regard to their accessibility, availability, and capacity.
- Supervising for LANs as well as for wireless networks.
- It offers auto-discovery by which you can create and maintain a device inventory.
- The Live topology maps in a range of formats are available.
- It has a protocol analyzer that identifies high-traffic applications.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| The dashboard contains color-coded graphs of live data in your network monitoring system. | It has an enormous range of features that require time to clearly understand. |
| There are no additional plugins or downloads; everything is included in PRTG. | |
| It is an easy-to-use solution for all business sizes. | |
| It monitors a diverse range of devices with SNMP | |
| It offers a free version | |
| It has a wide range of alert mediums like SMS, emails, and any third-party integrations. |
Free trial: 30-day free trial.
30-Days Free Trial
9) WhatsUp Gold
The Whatsup Gold is the network monitoring software covering you up from network edge to the cloud. It is one of the best free networking tools that gives you complete visibility into the performance of your network devices and alerts you on their malfunctions.
Key features:
- The WhatsUp gold’s discovery and mapping tool feature combines layer 2 and 3 methods to create comprehensive and customizable maps.
- Everything connected to your network is discovered and mapped.
- This network management tool allows you to perform dynamic changes in maps.
- Easily visualize and detect network dependencies.
- Offers optimization of network traffic and bandwidth utilization
- Provides real-time alerts when CPU and bandwidth thresholds are exceeded.
- It helps you to reduce MTTRs with intuitive workflows and easy customization.
- Allows you to easily switch between physical, virtual, and dependency views, resolving issues quickly.
- Allows you to analyze bandwidth consumption across networks, servers, etc.
- Gives control of AWS and Azure cloud environments
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| provides actionable, customizable dashboards | It takes time to learn the interface. |
| rapidly find and fix network and server issues | |
| accurate alert system | |
| the software is user-friendly | |
| supportive customer care |
Free trial: Yes
Link: https://www.whatsupgold.com/
10) Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool. This home network management software is widely used for monitoring servers and network hardware. This tool can forecast future behavior based on historical data. This free network monitoring software provides monitoring metrics, such as CPU load, network utilization, and disk space consumption too.
Key features:
- Easily monitor network bandwidth usage.
- Provides flexible and extendable data gathering for windows
- Various metric collection methods and protocols
- It automatically starts discovering network which comes under the radar of Zabbix agents.
- It supports both protocol agent and SNMP protocol
- It gives a number of out-of-the-box templates
- Automatically detect device configuration changes
- Predicts network downtimes, trends of bandwidth usage, and much more.
- Actively detects anomalies in network load.
- Generate custom reports remediation scripts and retrieve monitoring data.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| You can decrease the notification noise with the event correlation feature | Must provide more templates for rich monitoring |
| It has a mobile application | |
| Build flexible escalation scenarios | |
| Has multiple alerts delivering sources: email, SMS, jabber | |
| Allows you to run remote commands even behind firewalls. |
Link: https://www.zabbix.com/network_monitoring
11) Icinga
It is an open-source infrastructure and service monitoring tool. Icinga is one of the best free network monitoring software that alters and reports the health of your IT environment.
Key features:
- Monitoring of Services
- Supports both direct monitoring and SNMP monitoring
- This Allows clustering and Zone Monitoring
- Configuration & Templates
- The dashboard displays the alert dependencies.
- The alerts are sent via SMS, email, or mobile messaging apps.
- Effectively collects the data and helps in troubleshooting.
- Gives you full visibility on the health, work, and performance of all systems and applications.
- Instantly informs you about any anomalies occurring in the system
- Automatically generates, imports, and synchronizes third-party data from several sources.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| It monitors a massive amount of data | The setup can be made easier |
| Maintains your CMDB | Should provide segregation |
| Uses several configuration tools like Puppet, Chef, or Ansible, which automatically transmit the data to your system | Free trial: Not available |
| Allows you to manage the network monitoring system in the cloud | |
| Use versioned configuration to track changes. |
Link: https://icinga.com/products/monitoring-automation/
12) Nagios
Nagios delivers a monitoring, graphing, and reporting platform for your entire organization, including operating systems, servers, network devices, websites, cloud servers, and much more. This free networking monitoring software shares a complete detail of your IT infrastructure and its performance.
Key features:
- It offers the highest degree of monitoring server performance due to the powerful Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine.
- It offers powerful dashboards allowing you to monitor information and third-party data.
- With the GUI, you can provide flexibility to your customers and team members to customize layout, designs, and preferences on a per-user basis.
- It is easy to use because of the integrated web-based configuration interface.
- Multi-tenant capabilities
- The administrators can easily view network issues and resolve them before they become major catastrophes.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| The dashboard offers a customizable overview of services, hosts, and network devices | Many configuration files are very hard to set up for users |
| Provides automated, integrated trending and capacity planning graphs | |
| The infrastructure management has various features like auto-discovery, Auto decommissioning, Mass acknowledgment, etc. | |
| Provides features like configuration snapshots, using which you can archive your configuration, save it, revert it, and much more. |
Free trial: Yes, Software is Open Source
Link: https://www.nagios.com/products/nagios-xi/
13) OP5 Monitor
OP5 Monitor is a monitoring solution that is built on Naemon, a Nagios fork. So it is compatible with all Nagios plugins. It is a software product for the server, network monitoring, and management based on the Open Source project. The OP5 Monitor displays the IT network’s status, health, and performance.
Key features:
- It gives you a complete IT estate through a single pane of glass, allowing you to consolidate monitoring tools.
- It gives you a rest-API that supports automation and integration with other systems.
- Log Server Monitoring
- This network management tool offfers fully customizable and interactive dashboards.
- Unparalleled Scalability across Distributed Environments
- It visually presents all your data in service level reports for server and network monitoring.
- It monitors everything from the server’s containers.
- Provides scaling of all aspects of your IT environment
- Accurate data collection regardless of the technology stack
- Automatic Self-Healing
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| Customizable reports | It doesn’t show the data in real-time |
| Uptime reporting | |
| The API makes it easy to integrate the information | |
| Any size organization can use it | |
| Its root cause analysis feature is good |
Free trial: 30-days
Link: https://www.itrsgroup.com/products/network-monitoring-op5-monitor
14) LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is the network monitoring software that supervises the network and performance of your entire IT infrastructure by monitoring, alerting, and graphing under one secure platform.
Key features:
- The deployment takes only a few minutes with their agentless and cloud-based collector.
- Monitoring via SNMP, jFlow, NetFlow, sFlow, WMI, NBAR2, and IPFIX.
- LogicMonitor offers a complete view of the network, helping you to navigate the issues and troubleshoot them easily.
- Network topology mapping, root cause analysis, and intelligent alerting
- This network management tool provides influential visualization and custom dashboard features by which you can quickly understand your system, how they are connected, and what issues are impacting the performance.
- 2000+ out-of-the-box integrations with top brands allowing Auto-discovery of any device on any network.
| 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|
| Can have a deeper vision into the network traffic with dynamic topology maps | Reporting needs improvement |
| Dynamic topology maps allow you to resolve and visualize alerts in real-time | |
| Supports for SD-WAN and cloud-based networks. | |
| Track BGP sessions and OSPF adjacencies. | |
| 24/7 customer support |
Free trial: 14- days, the free version
Link: https://www.logicmonitor.com/network-monitoring
FAQ
❓ Why Network Monitoring Tool is used?
Network Monitoring Software is used to monitor the performance of your IT infrastructure. These tools allow you to find network issues and resolve them.
🚀 Which are the Best Network Monitoring Tools?
Below are some of the Best Network Monitoring Tools:
- Network Bandwidth Analyzer
- Auvik
- ManageEngine OpManager
- Site24x7
- Datadog
- Obkio
- Paessler PRTG
- Network Configuration Manager
💻 How to select a Network Monitoring Software?
Consider the following factors before you decide.
- Network Monitoring tools should be able to provide real-time performance monitoring and visualization.
- The cost involved in training employees on the tool.
- Tools should be customizable to each user’s specific roles.
- Consider the security options offered by software providers.
- Product price.
- Product features meet your requirements.
- Integration with management software such as ERP is desirable.
There is no best tool! You need to select a tool that best caters to your requirements.
🚀 When should you NOT use Network Monitoring Software?
You should not use Network Monitoring tools when diagnosing small and simple networks as these tools take lots of time to analyze IT infrastructure performance and generate the final report.