10 BEST Server Monitoring Tools & Software (Sep 2023)

By : Lawrence Williams Lawrence Williams
Hours Updated

The fast-growing business world has made the server necessary for small and large organizations. A business needs a strong network connection and powerful servers to hold, access, and transfer all data and files.

The servers, however, need constant watching and tracking. To do this, you will need to have software that monitors your server. Server Monitoring Software monitors your infrastructure CPU load, RAM, firewall, sensor, bandwidth, error rate, network, disk space usage, switch, router, and remote access.

Here is a curated list of Top 10 Server 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…

Best Software for Server Monitoring

Monitoring Tool Name Metric coverage Metric Correlation Main Features Free Trial Link
ManageEngine OpManager Configurable Metrics, traces, logs, events • Application tracing
• log management		 30 days free trial Learn More
Site24x7 Configurable Metrics, traces • Maintenance Scheduling
• Customizable Reports		 30 days free trial Learn More
Server and Application Monitor Configurable Metrics, traces • Single integrated web interface.
• Intelligent app infra dependency mapping.		 30 days free trial Learn More
Better Stack Configurable Metrics, Logs, traces • Single integrated interface, dashboards, livetail
• Unlimited actionable alerts		 60-day free trial Learn More
Paessler PRTG Network Configurable Metrics, traces • Distributed monitoring
• 12 sensors		 30 days free trial Learn More

1) ManageEngine OpManager

Best for Drilling down to the root cause of an issue and eradicating it.

OpManager is a proactive server monitoring tool that helps organizations monitor and manage their servers seamlessly, ensuring uninterrupted business operations. Monitoring your servers is deemed essential to identify issues that might curb the performance and cause costly downtime. ManageEngine OpManager helps monitor your server via SNMP and WMI protocols and makes sure the health and performance of your servers is absolute.

OpManager also provides comprehensive virtual server monitoring capabilities that help businesses identify bottlenecks and fix serious performance issues. The product offers a sole dashboard for every ESX server and enables IT admins to view the CPU, memory, and disk utilization for every guest VM occurrence on the ESX server.

OpManager’s server performance monitoring capabilities include supporting SMPT, POP, and IMAP on your exchange servers. It can monitor more than 15 key services and 50 critical variables over a separate exchange monitoring dashboard. OpManager also monitors Host, VMs and Storage Repositories of Citrix XenServer and offers the required visibility into their performance. Plus, OpManager helps monitor VMWare and Hyper-V servers supporting a hybrid virtual environment.

OpManager offers a 30-day trial, so you can decide if the product fits your monitoring needs.

OpManager

Features:

  • Monitor server health and availability around the clock.
  • Multiple threshold system for proactive server monitoring.
  • Effective capacity planning utilizing the server’s system resource usage.
  • In-depth reports on historical data to help determine the best strategy for the future.
  • Efficient multi-vendor support to monitor important applications and their processes.

Pros

  • Multi-vendor support
  • In-depth reports for capacity planning
  • Intuitive visualization capacities to detect issues in its early stages
  • Proactive alerting system
  • Automated fault-management operations
  • Easy to install and operate

Cons

  • Difficult to understand for beginners

Visit OpManager >>

2) Site24x7

Best for: IT infrastructure monitoring solution to track the condition of application infrastructure.

Site 24×7 is a cloud-based network monitoring tool that monitors the status of the server and web endpoints 24 hours a day.

This tool oversees a company’s network infrastructure. It does so by watching over all hardware and virtual resources, both on-premises and the cloud.

Site 24×7 observes your website’s health and gives you a notification when it detects a specific abnormality. The monitoring solution watches the activities of services such as the file transfer protocols (FTP), event thresholds, simple mail transfer protocols (SMTP), application performance management (APM), and domain name systems (DNS) record monitoring.

Site24x7

Features:

  • Real-time automated alerts help in managing risks.
  • Data visualization for the whole server stack.
  • Customizable reports for maintenance scheduling.
  • Policy-based automation.
  • It supports third-Party integrations.
  • Remote monitoring using SNMP mode.
  • Real user monitoring and analysis of metrics
  • Supported platforms: Windows Servers, macOS Linux, Cisco, Sonicwall, Juniper, 3Com, Netgear, FreeBSD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure, among others.
  • Licensing: Proprietary and Cloud-based
  • System Requirements: RAM: 8GB, Hard Disk Space: 80GB and CPU: 2 GHz processor
  • Price: $9/month
  • Free trial: Yes (30 days free trial)

Pros

  • Use real-time data to discover network devices, create inventory reports, and build a network map and charts.
  • Allow for maintenance scheduling and keeping statistics for alerts.
  • The existing mobile app helps you to manage any underlying risk.
  • It has a free version for those monitoring below five locations.

Cons

  • Configuring the transactions recorder is time-consuming.
  • The extensive interface can be challenging to navigate.

Visit Site24x7 >>

3) Server and Application Monitor

Best for Has a Server and Application Monitor (SAM) to oversee server usage and application metrics performance.

Server and Application Monitor is a powerful agentless Server & Application Monitor (SAM) for IT management. It tracks the server and application performance, alerting and reporting any issues.

SolarWinds has an integrated capability to monitor virtual servers both on-premises and across the cloud for more than 1,200 different applications. It provides an understanding of the application performance and the server usage metrics.

It has features like remote server monitoring solutions, server inventory monitoring, server process monitoring, automated server network monitoring, and server health monitoring.

This tool integrates with other SolarWinds IT management tools. It makes it easy to visualize, diagnose, and manage other infrastructure risks that may affect server performance.

Solarwinds

Features:

  • It has over 1200+ applications for simple monitoring
  • Single integrated web interface.
  • Intelligent app infra dependency mapping.
  • Monitors real-time processes.
  • Offer instant insight for deep packet analysis.
  • Optimized performance by AWS monitoring tools.
  • Customizable dashboard.
  • Real-time server monitoring software.
  • Quick installation and easy setup.
  • Active directory health and storage monitoring.
  • It tracks the availability and status of servers.
  • Supported platforms: Microsoft Windows Server, macOS 10.13 – 10.15.X, CentOS 6.5 and 7.1, Fedora 24 and 25, Java Platform, and Red Hat Linux.
  • Licensing: Proprietary
  • System Requirements: RAM: 4GB, Hard Disk Space: 20GB and CPU: 64-bit Dual-core
  • Price: starts at $2,995 for 150 monitors
  • Free trial: Yes (30 days free trial)

Pros

  • Alerting features make it easy to use.
  • It supports packet analysis and SNMP monitoring.
  • Systems management software is easy to navigate using drag and drop widgets
  • Application dependency mapping and automatic service discovery.

Cons

  • The features and modules may be overwhelming for non-technical users.

Visit Server Application

4) Better Stack

Better Stack offers a radically better observability platform. It combines monitoring, log management, observability dashboards, incident management, and status pages into a single integrated product.

Better Stack is best for those wanting to centralize and simplify their stack. It is a cloud-based solution for real-time monitoring, synthetic monitoring, log management and infrastructure monitoring.

Main benefit is that it also includes beautifully designed observability dashboards (comparable to Grafana in terms of capabilities), that can be used to easily visualize any monitoring setup or specific incidents. This monitoring tools combines all the capabilities from monitoring to alerting, incident management, visualization and incident communication.

Better Stack

Features:

  • Customizable observability dashboards
  • Unlimited actionable alerts
  • Easy setup and maintenance
  • App and server monitoring
  • On-call scheduling and incident management built-in
  • Automatic updates posted to hosted status pages
  • Supporting one-click third party integrations (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Vercel and others)
  • 30-seconds monitoring frequency
  • Licensing: Cloud-based
  • Price: Free plan available
  • Free trial: Yes (60 days free trial)

Pros

  • Easy setup and many integrations
  • Actionable observability dashboards
  • Integrated incident management and on-call alerting

Cons

  • No APM (application performance monitoring) capabilities

Visit Better Stack >>

5) Paessler PRTG Network Monitor

Best for: Suitable both for small and enterprise environments. Can monitor any IT-related assets.

PRTG is a real-time infrastructure monitoring application for Windows and Linux servers. It involves a variety of server status trackers to monitor all systems, traffic, and network devices without any extra plugins.

PRTG tool is a real-time monitor perfect for any size of business. It monitors servers for reliability, availability, capacity, and accessibility.

This server monitoring platform caters to database servers, web servers, virtual servers, and mail. PTRG offers a robust cloud monitoring suite, giving a centralized monitoring system for all types of PAAS, SAAS, and IAAS solutions.

Paessler

Features:

  • Automatic device discovery with suitable sensors.
  • Intuitive web interface.
  • Customizable dashboards with PRTG maps.
  • Multiple user interfaces with customizable languages.
  • 20 sensors for monitoring file server.
  • On-premise and cloud-based resource monitoring.
  • Flexible alerting through SMS, Push notifications, and Email.
  • Analyze network using bandwidth monitoring.
  • 12 sensors for monitoring the file and mail server.
  • Robust reporting generator.
  • Supported platforms: Microsoft Windows 7-8.1,10, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2-2012 R2, 2016, 2019.
  • Licensing: Proprietary
  • System Requirements: RAM: 8GB, Hard Disk Space: 80GB and CPU: 2 GHz processor.
  • Price: Free for 100 sensors, $1,600 (500-sensor license), $14,500 (unlimited sensors)
  • Free trial: Yes (30 days free trial)

Pros

  • Report or custom views creation by the Drag and drop feature.
  • The latest inventory changes reflect almost immediately by auto-discovery.
  • It can monitor various aspects of your server and webpage resources using flexible sensors.
  • Offers a full scope of third-party integration and alert mediums such as Email and SMS.

Cons

  • The platform features are very comprehensive and take time to learn.
  • The reporting setup is not so easy.

Visit PRTG Network >>

6) Atera

Best for Cloud-based, complete remote server monitoring solution and IT management platform.

Atera is a SaaS-Based server monitoring tool designed for MSPs and IT professionals. It uses the Atera agent feature to oversee all servers and applications across your existing networks. This agent monitors the server regularly and then sends back signals to the cloud.

This cloud-based software visualizes server performance and tracks the action of applications. It has an inventory that supports system patch management and software updates.

This monitor cover server details such as software inventory, logged-in users, virtualization configurations, permissions, Active Directory accounts, application activity, and resource utilization.

Atera

Features:

  • Complete remote management and monitoring utilities.
  • It provides an all-in-one MSPs solution.
  • Run professional service automation profiles.
  • Generates automated reporting and analytics
  • Network device autodiscovery.
  • Real-time alerting solves risk factors before a problem occurs.
  • Extensive shared script library.
  • Supported platforms: macOS, Sierra 10.13, Microsoft OS (Windows 7), Microsoft Server >2008.
  • Licensing: Proprietary, Cloud-based
  • System Requirements: RAM: 8GB, Hard Disk Space: 500MB and CPU: 64-bit x86
  • Price: $79/month (pro), $119/month (growth), $149/month (power)
  • Free trial: Yes (30 days free trial)

Pros

  • Enable clients to connect remotely to office computers.
  • Simple user interfaces for metrics viewing.
  • Automation profiles can run the ongoing updates and maintenance.
  • The time tracking option makes the maintaining task simple.

Cons

  • Managed Service Providers (MSPs) may not work with smaller organizations.

Link: https://www.atera.com/

7) Nagios XI

Best for: Supports agentless live server monitoring. Focuses on network traffic, server metrics, and application performance.

Nagios XI is an agentless network server monitoring software and enterprise server with advanced configuration and reporting options. Nagios XI software facilitates network operation and server monitoring in a central solution.

Nagios XI monitors all virtual on-premises applications due to various third-party plugins. This is because of its updated web interface and robust server monitoring engine capability. It focuses on real-time monitoring of infrastructure performance, operating systems, network traffic, server system metrics, and application performance.

Nagios

Features:

  • Alert delivery through SMS, Pop-up notifications, and Email.
  • Internet usage monitoring.
  • Auto-Discovery configuration wizards.
  • Reporting relevant metrics for logs and databases.
  • Provides performance monitoring and graphing.
  • Real-time monitoring and risk management.
  • Proactive planning manages the upgrade of the platform.
  • Cloud and network outage observability.
  • Monitoring automation that manages a large amount of data
  • Supported platforms: Ubuntu 16.04,18.0 & 20.04 (LTS), Oracle Linux 7/8, RHEL 7/8, and, Debian 9-11, Solaris, Unix and CentOS.
  • Licensing: Open-source with commercial options
  • System Requirements: RAM: 1GB. Hard Disk Space: 40GB and CPU 1 GHz Processor
  • Price: $1,995 (Standard), $3,495 (Enterprise)
  • Free trial: Yes (30 days free trial)

Pros

  • Graph view suggests upgrade plans and provides information on capacity planning.
  • Auto-discovery saves time for the operation of manual network devices.
  • It integrates with other network components such as switches and routers.
  • Customizable user interface.

Cons

  • It needs virtualization for it to run on Windows OS.
  • The configuration of the user interface is complex.

Link: https://www.nagios.org/

8) Dynatrace

Best for: The best application performance management (APM). Monitors and diagnoses cloud-based applications for an organization.

Dynatrace is an all-in-one performance management (APM) platform that simplifies complex clouds. It is designed to offer an intelligent AI-Assistance that performs log monitoring of the entire infrastructure.

Dynatrace is found in both on-premise models and software (SaaS) software. It can monitor/diagnose server logs, metrics, and cloud-based applications.

The Dynatrace software indicates process-specific network metrics. It also utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze the performance of your infrastructure.

Dynatrace

Features:

  • Real user performance analysis both on mobile devices and browsers.
  • Visualization capability and Software artificial intelligence
  • Exhibit a threat intelligence capability.
  • Enable you to find errors and Bug Tracking.
  • Offers digital experience management.
  • An All-in-one platform allows for a large set of data analytics.
  • Detection of motion events in the dynamic environment.
  • Automated discovery for all the virtualized components.
  • AI-powered anomaly detection with vulnerability management.
  • Validate problem detection and incident profile alerting system.
  • Supported platforms: SUSE Enterprise Linux 12.2, Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux AMI 2018.x, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, Debian 9/10.
  • Licensing: Proprietary
  • System Requirements: RAM: 2GB, Hard Disk Space: 4GB and CPU: 1 dual-core processor.
  • Price: $12/ month, for 8 GB Host, $25/ month for open ingestion, $0.10 for Cloud Automation Unit
  • Free trial: Yes (15 days free trial)

Pros

  • The highly intelligent AI narrows down the designated causes of an issue/risk.
  • Dynatrace setup is relatively simple.
  • It provides easy monitoring due to its excellent visualization.

Cons

  • Limited dashboard functionality.
  • The user interface is complex and requires more training.

Link: https://www.dynatrace.com/

9) Zabbix

Best for: can configure straight from the web interface.

Zabbix is an all-in-one open-source network monitoring tool for metrics. It monitors IT infrastructure such as web servers, networks, cloud services, devices, and other IT resources.

Zabbix configures directly from the web interface. It allows clients to store, collect, and manage the information collected from IT infrastructure.

This software enables administrators to detect server and system problems within a short period. It is necessary to avoid the risk of system failure and downtime.

Zabbix

Features:

  • Customizable and predefined reporting.
  • Pre-packaged monitoring templates.
  • Real-time configurable alerts.
  • Improvement suggestions.
  • Cloud observability for metric collection.
  • Web-based configuration.
  • Data visualization with widget-based dashboards.
  • Multi-network monitoring capability.
  • Root cause analysis improves problem tracking.
  • Configuration change management.
  • Supported platforms: Windows, Linux, IBM AIX, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Solaris: 9-11.
  • Licensing: Open-source with commercial support options
  • System Requirements: RAM: 1.5GB, Hard Disk Space: 8GB and CPU: 2 CPU cores/2GB
  • Price: Free
  • Free trial: No (Free)

Pros

  • The user interface is highly customizable.
  • Supports notification system in the form of Email, SMS, etc.
  • Immediate detection of configuration changes.

Cons

  • Steep learning curve due to the complex database.

Link: https://www.zabbix.com/

10) Icinga

Best for: Performance Monitoring, raising alerts, and keeping the admin informed.

Icinga is a branch of Nagios that is a free, open-source server monitoring solution. It checks server performance and network availability. It also has an integrated engine with the capability to monitor extensive infrastructure.

This monitoring tool provides a simpler plugin integration and supports more databases. It also has a better web interface that is responsive for robust server performance monitoring. The interface is scalable and decreases configuration complexity.

Icinga can still integrate with Nagios plugins.

Icinga

Features:

  • Real-time automated alerts.
  • Provides performance monitoring and graphing.
  • Monitoring automation that manages a large amount of data
  • Mapping and visual reporting for metrics and logs.
  • Extensibility through plugins.
  • Scalable network mapping.
  • Supported platforms: Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, IBM AIX, Solaris,
  • Unix, and HP-UX.
  • Licensing: Open source
  • System Requirements: RAM: 4GB, Hard Disk Space: 50GBand CPU: 2 cores
  • Price: Free
  • Free trial: No (Free)

Pros

  • The user interface is simple and customizable.
  • The modules allow for different functionality.
  • Setup is quick, and server monitoring begins immediately.

Cons

  • New users might find it complicated due to its complex features.

Link: https://icinga.com/

What are the Factors to consider in Server Monitoring Tools?

Server monitoring tools have risen in numbers on the market today. Selecting the best one for your need could be challenging for clients.

Below are the main factors to keep in mind when choosing the right tool solution:

  • Metrics Correlation: There must be a correlation between the monitoring tool and the matrix you are going for. This is important when debugging a problem.
  • Less Configuration Overhead: Consider getting a tool that needs minimal maintenance and is easy to set up. This is necessary, especially when running an enterprise monitoring platform. That chosen tool should meet your needs by just its default dashboard and alert settings.
  • Alerting features: Any monitoring tool should have the ability to notify you of any problem. This way, you can have oversight and deal with any resulting risk appropriately.
  • Coverage of Metric: The tool needs to collect and analyze all metrics you would consider essential. It should configure and customize the metrics to match your preference.
  • Anomaly Detection: You need to consider a monitoring solution with anomaly detection capabilities. This is because sometimes, you might not know that the monitoring system needs to give an alert when a problem arises.
  • Hardware considerations: Look into the hardware architecture used for your network monitoring. Some architecture contains particular components that need unique solutions.
  • Access Control: If you are looking for smooth and secure access, then the solution you select should be able to support SSO functionality identity management.

FAQs

A server monitoring tool is software that monitors and tracks the server’s performance. These tools enable a user to analyze a server’s utilization rates continually. These aid in the identification of problems found during the performance. If you’re looking for network monitoring tools to help you manage your servers and network infrastructure, you can check out the list of top network monitoring tools available.

Here are the best Server Monitoring software:

There are some good free and open-source IT infrastructure monitoring tools suitable for any environment. These tools include Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, and Icinga.

Best Software for Server Monitoring

Monitoring Tool Name Metric coverage Metric Correlation Main Features Free Trial Link
ManageEngine OpManager Configurable Metrics, traces, logs, events • Application tracing
• log management		 30 days free trial Learn More
Site24x7 Configurable Metrics, traces • Maintenance Scheduling
• Customizable Reports		 30 days free trial Learn More
Server and Application Monitor Configurable Metrics, traces • Single integrated web interface.
• Intelligent app infra dependency mapping.		 30 days free trial Learn More
Better Stack Configurable Metrics, Logs, traces • Single integrated interface, dashboards, livetail
• Unlimited actionable alerts		 60-day free trial Learn More
Paessler PRTG Network Configurable Metrics, traces • Distributed monitoring
• 12 sensors		 30 days free trial Learn More
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