5 Best Network Device Monitoring Tools

Today's networks are complex and ever-growing. It can include hundreds and even thousands of different devices and endpoints, and this means, you need a holistic control and visibility into all that's happening within your network.

And this is not easy and not something that can be done manually. This is where advanced network monitoring tools come into play.

Benefits of Network Monitoring Tools

Besides providing control and visibility, here are some of the other benefits that come with using network monitoring tools.

• It helps to identify specific areas of your network that are experiencing problems.
• Eases the troubleshooting process.
• Optimizes the use of resources.
• Saves time and money.
• Reduces downtimes.
• Enhances compliance with industry standards.
• Helps with capacity planning.
• Discovering and fixing security threats, and more.

Now that you know the importance of network monitoring tools, let's take a look at some of the well-known tools that can provide all the above benefits and more!

Below are five of the best network monitoring tools available in the market today. We have evaluated them based on their capabilities, performance, and the potential value they can add to your business.

Here is our list of the best network device monitoring tools:

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL This multi-vendor network monitoring tool works well across different platforms. More importantly, it can scale and expand with your network's needs.
2. Paessler PRTG This flexible network monitoring tool uses sensors to monitor the different aspects of your network and alerts you in case of discrepancies and deviations.
3. ManageEngine OpManager This affordable monitoring solution can monitor a wide variety of devices such as routers, firewalls, load balancers, servers, and more to provide a comprehensive understanding of your network's performance.
4. Datadog Network Monitoring This comprehensive monitoring platform provides in-depth visibility into the health of network devices, servers, connections, and other dependencies without your organization.
5. Site24X7 Network Monitoring This is an agentless SaaS monitoring tool that helps you to have complete control over your entire IT infrastructure.

The Best Network Device Monitoring Tools

Let's now take a detailed look at each of these tools, so you can decide the best fit for your organization.

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL

The SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a comprehensive platform that can monitor multi-vendor devices and provide insights into their health and performance. It can also scale well with your growing business needs.

Features

Below are some of the salient features of SolarWinds NPM.

• Monitoring Availability The most salient feature of SolarWinds NPM s its ability to collect detailed network metrics quickly. Using these metrics, you can easily identify the existing vulnerabilities and weak spots and can fix them right away. As a result, the chances for your downtime reduce greatly. In turn, this will enhance productivity within your organization and can also help you meet your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with your clients. Furthermore,  you can constantly monitor the performance and availability of your network and can take corrective action as needed.
• Instant Alerts NPM compares the performance metrics of your network with established baseline values and alerts you when these metrics go beyond the threshold. It sends alerts through many channels, and you can choose the ones that are ideal for your communication practices.  These alerts also contain the context of the problem, so it becomes easy to identify the root cause. Accordingly, you can fix the problem faster.
• Provides the Larger Picture Earlier, we briefly talked about providing the context for the problem. SolarWinds' NPM does this using something called Orion Maps. This map specializes in mapping the physical and logical relationships among the different devices and entities, so you can isolate the cause quickly.
• Hop Analysis NPM encompasses a tool called NetPath that detects the complete path a packet takes from its source to destination. This hop analysis identifies any network latency, dropped packets, bandwidth issues, and other potential problems in your network.
• Provides Visibility SolarWinds NPM correlates multiple entities on a common timeline, so you get complete visibility of what's happening in your network. With this information, you can identify gaps easily and fix them before it starts to impact the wider organization.

In all, SolarWinds NPM accelerates the identification of gaps and problems in your network and provides the context to fix the same easily. It also constantly stays on top of the health and performance of your network.

Pricing: NPM's pricing starts from $1,638.

Free Trial: Click here for a 30-day free trial.

2. Paessler PRTG

Paessler PRTG monitors all the systems, applications, and devices in your infrastructure using sensors, where each sensor monitors one aspect of your every device or application's performance. This way, you can scale up or down easily based on your business needs.

Features

Here's a look at some of the salient features of PRTG.

• Intuitive Maps and Dashboards PRTG comes with intuitive maps and dashboards that provide real-time information in a way that you can understand.  Its map designer comes with more than 300 different objects to depict devices, systems, applications, traffic, and more. You can use these components to provide a realistic view of your network. You can also use HTML to customize your map and can share it with others through a URL.
• Alerts This platform sends alerts as soon as it detects any unusual metrics. Typically, it constantly compares the metrics with established thresholds and reports in case of any major deviations. This way, you're alerted to the problems right away. PRTG sends alerts through many channels such as email, HTTP, push notifications, and more.
• Works well across Devices PRTG works well across multiple devices. Also, its web-based interface provides a uniform look and feel, regardless of the device on which you access it. Besides this, it also provides SSL-secured remote and local access. There are apps for iOS and Android as well.
• Failover Tolerance A key feature of PRTG is failover tolerant monitoring. This means when the primary cluster master fails, another node takes over right away. So, there is no impact whatsoever on the systems or the notification-sending process.
• Remote Probes PRTG supports distributed monitoring where you can use remote probes to monitor the different endpoints on your LAN. Note that every PRTG license comes with unlimited probes, so you can stay on top of your network's performance. If you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you can extend it to your clients' networks as well.

In all, PRTG is an efficient way of monitoring a network. Since it works well across multiple platforms and can be used to monitor varied aspects, it is highly useful in distributed environments.

Pricing:

The cost depends on the number of sensors you use. Typically, one sensor is used to monitor one aspect of a machine. For example, if you measure the memory and processing power of a single machine, that equals two sensors. Below is the pricing for the sensors you'd want to use.

• Up to 100 sensors – Free
• Up to 500 sensors – $1,799
• Up to 1000 sensors – $3,399
• Up to 2500 sensors – $6,899
• Up to 5000 sensors – $11,999
• Up to 10,000 sensors – $15,999

Download: Click here to start with up to 100 sensors.

3. ManageEngine OpManager

ManageEngine's OpManager is a comprehensive monitoring tool that can stay on top of the health and performance of many types of devices such as routers, firewalls, servers, PCs, and more. The in-depth information collected from these devices provides a thorough understanding of your network's performance at any time.

Features

Below are the salient features of OpManager.

• Monitors Servers Across Vendors OpManager can monitor servers across multiple vendors and platforms. It works well on both physical and virtual servers that spread across multiple platforms such as Windows, Linux, VMware, and more. You can also monitor Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and other virtual machines. It works well on hybrid systems too.
• Enhances Fault Handling This platform provides complete visibility into your network's performance, so it becomes easy to identify faults and fix them at the earliest. You can even set up first-level automation for troubleshooting and maintenance using OpManager. It even comes with a rule-based processing engine that can handle 300 SNMP traps per second. Its Syslog monitoring provides context through syslogs to help you perform the next steps in troubleshooting.
• Advanced Alerting Mechanism OpManager sends alerts about issues through SMS and email based on your preferences. This helps your employees to monitor problems in your network, regardless of their location. This platform also constantly monitors your network's parameters and reports any deviations. This way, you can know issues as they occur and fix them quickly.
• Integrations OpManager integrates well with many third-party tools to provide the flexibility and extensibility you need for your business. You can even extend OpManager to custom apps.
• Additional Features Other than the above features, there are many additional functionalities that OpManager offers. Some of them include network configuration management, IP address management, firewall log management, application performance management, network traffic analysis, and more.

Overall, OpManager is a wide-arching platform that encompasses many aspects of your network monitoring. It is also highly flexible and extensible and can be adapted to suit your business needs.

Pricing: Click here to get a custom quote.

Free Trial: Start a free trial here.

4. Datadog Network Monitoring

Datadog's network monitoring platform provides granular visibility into every aspect of your network, including the transactions, packet movement, and more. At the same time, it also aggregates all this data to give you wide visibility into the organization's operations.

Features

Let's now look at the important features of Datadog's monitoring platform.

• Optimizing Resources Datadog uses tags to classify all your resources, so you can sort and filter your metrics to find what you want. This way, you can access the information you need right away. Also, you will get a better understanding of how your resources are used and where are the leaks. Accordingly, you can plan for the capacity and optimize their use.
• Identify Misconfigurations A key benefit of Datadog's network performance monitoring platform is its ability to identify misconfigurations. All that you have to do is simply head to the area of the problem, look through the configurations, and fix the misconfigured parameter. Likewise, it can also handle connectivity issues. For example, in a Kubernetes cluster, a single container can take up all the bandwidth. With Datadog, you can look at the images, identify the container, and make the necessary configuration changes to prevent this from happening.
• Monitors Everything This comprehensive monitoring tool monitors almost every object in your network, including abstract ones. It checks on containers, individual hosts, services, applications, and more. It offers instant insights, so you can aggregate them to gain wide visibility into your network. Also, you can identify dependencies, and dig deep down to get the granular information you need for decision making.
• Integrations Another cool aspect of Datadog is that it integrates well with other apps and platforms, so you can extend it easily within your infrastructure. This way, you can correlate the logs of different applications to understand your network better.

Overall, Datadog is an advanced monitoring platform that integrates well into your existing infrastructure and at the same time, provides the insights you need for making the necessary decisions.

Pricing: Click here for detailed pricing.

Free Trial: Click here for a 14-day free trial.

5. Site24x7 Network Monitoring Tool

Site24x7 is an agentless and SaaS monitoring tool that provides all the insights you need at the device and interface levels. In turn, these insights provide the complete control you need over your network and overall IT infrastructure.

Features

Below are the features of this tool.

• Extensive Monitoring Site24x7 is best known for its extensive monitoring capabilities. It stays on top of the health and performance of your websites, servers, applications, cloud infrastructure, logs, networks, and more. It's also used to analyze the real-user app experience, so you can make the necessary changes to enhance the overall end-user experience. It works well across vendors and platforms.
• Optimizes Workloads This tool provides insights into the usage of your cloud resources and the associated costs. Based on this information, it helps to optimize workloads for your infrastructure. Also, you have all the insights you need across hybrid and virtualization environments for improved optimization.
• Centralized Log Management Site24x7 implements a centralized log management system where you can connect all the dots to identify the likely causes for problems and outages. Plus, you can run queries on the logs to get the specific information you need quickly. Based on this information, you can set up alerts and do so much more.
• Additional Features Besides the above features, Site24x7 also offers a ton of other things such as access through mobile apps so you can stay on top of your infrastructure's health on the go, generates extensive reports that can be used for internal auditing and compliance, helps with root-cause analysis, handles SLA management, and more.

In all, Site24x7 is a comprehensive tool that stays on top of all aspects of your monitoring and through it, eases your decision-making process.

Pricing:

Site24x7 offers four pricing plans:

• Starter: $9/month
• PRO: $35/month
• Classic: $89/month
• Enterprise: $225/month

Free Trial: Click here to sign up and start a 30-day free trial.

Thus, these are the popular network device monitoring tools.

Bottomline

To conclude, network device monitoring tools are key to ensuring that your network and all the devices and applications that work on it are in good health and perform optimally. These tools point out any deviations or issues in any device, so you can fix them at the earliest. Further, the insights offered by these tools come in handy for making decisions.

We hope this was a useful read for you. Click here to read more such guides.