7 excellent open source network monitoring tools

Network health is a measure of the health of the infrastructure, and enterprises need to constantly monitor the network status to provide information on the health of data centers and equipment. Often you and your manager will have different requirements for monitoring tools, the biggest of which may be cost.

Fortunately, there are many free enterprise-grade infrastructure monitoring software products that provide the same functionality as their paid counterparts. By using the right tools, you can monitor every aspect of your technology infrastructure and get alerts for any issues that arise as well as predict future trends.

There are also open source network monitoring software tools you can choose from. However, there are two considerations you should take into account before incorporating open source software into your toolset: support availability and deployed functionality.

Advantages of open source monitoring tools

Price is often the main reason why businesses choose open source tools. It’s hard to beat them in terms of cost-effectiveness, especially when compared to free or freemium options.

Another driver for enterprises to choose open source monitoring tools is that they are product agnostic. These tools can usually be integrated with any available technology or system and can use more than one type of code, which makes them easier to deploy into production environments. Compared with proprietary tools, they are more flexible and can be more adaptable to your team.

In addition, open source software applications usually have a large user and developer community, which leads to better support and feature enhancements. At the same time, they have a public feature roadmap, and anyone in the community can develop and release new features. Compared with traditional monitoring tools, you can access updated features faster, and you can even drive feature development based on your needs or development work.

By leveraging open source network monitoring tools, decision makers have the opportunity to shift budget to other tools or projects that need funding. IT leaders will enjoy lower overall budgets while still providing the same level of service and support to the business.

Before choosing an open source tool, be sure to investigate the support available. Even if using an open source community can make support easier and the community can help you troubleshoot issues, you may still need to obtain additional support or work with a third party to bring the open source tool into an enterprise production environment.

Open Source Network Monitoring Options

1. Cacti

Cacti uses network polling and data collection capabilities to collect device information in any size network through RRDTool's data logging and graphing system. It displays network health and performance in a visual form that is easy to understand, and these visualizations can be customized for your specific network.

2. Icinga

Icinga's network monitoring tool measures availability and performance, which you can view through a web interface. It is natively scalable and configurable with any network device. With Icinga modules, you can integrate and monitor other types of devices, such as VMware's vSphere cloud and appliances or application certificates, or access business process modeling tools.

3. FreeNMS

LibreNMS uses multiple network protocols to monitor devices on networks of any size. Its built-in API retrieves, manages, and plots collected data to provide visualization and insights about your network. The tool includes flexible alert options that integrate with email and SMS alert systems, and administrators can remotely monitor the network through iOS and Android applications.

(1) Pandora FMS

Pandora FMS has complete network monitoring capabilities. It can track the system health and performance of any IT equipment, including physical and virtual servers. The software also provides agent-based monitoring, including monitoring network latency, system temperature, and service availability. It integrates with most third-party open source applications and equipment from major infrastructure manufacturers.

(2) Prometheus

Prometheus is a product focused on data collection and analysis. It uses Simple Network Management Protocol pings to collect information from devices and check network performance. The internal PromQL system then analyzes the data and provides you with various insights and customized alerts.

(3) Wireshark

Wireshark is an open source tool first introduced in 1998. It is one of the oldest and most well-developed open source monitoring tools. It can run on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. The tool also provides real-time capture and offline analysis, as well as decryption support for top encryption protocols, which is very suitable for security needs.

(4) Zabbix

The Zabbix monitoring suite includes network monitoring capabilities and can track and report on the health and performance of any network. It also detects network node and connection health issues, performs health metric analysis including bandwidth usage, packet loss, and CPU/memory usage, and provides predictive trend reports.