The adoption of cloud technology makes it very convenient to set up and manage a large number of
servers to meet business and application requirements. The organization selects a large number of servers to meet load balancing needs and to meet disaster recovery and other situations.
Considering these trends, server monitoring tools have become very important. Although there are many types of
server management tools, they can meet the needs of different aspects of monitoring servers. In this article, we introduced the 16 best software tools for monitoring servers.
Best server monitoring tool
1. Nagios
Without Nagios, the list of tool
server monitoring software will be incomplete. This is a reliable tool for monitoring server health. This Linux-based monitoring system provides real-time monitoring of operating system, applications, infrastructure performance monitoring and system indicators.
Various third-party plug-ins enable Nagios XI to monitor all types of internal applications. Nagios is equipped with a powerful monitoring engine and an updated web interface, which can facilitate excellent monitoring functions through visualization such as graphics.
The main advantage of Nagios is to obtain a centralized view of
server and network operations. Nagios Core can be used as a free monitoring system. Nagios XI is recommended because of its advanced monitoring, reporting and configuration options.
2. WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold is a complete monitoring tool for Windows
servers. Thanks to its powerful layer 2/3 discovery capabilities, WhatsUp Gold can create detailed interactive maps of the entire network infrastructure. It can monitor the traffic between Web servers, applications, virtual machines, and Windows, Java and LAMP environments.
In addition to integrating the monitoring and management functions provided in the mobile application, it also provides real-time alerts via email and SMS. The functions of the integrated REST API include functions such as integrating monitoring data with other applications and automating many tasks.
WhatsUp Gold provides specific monitoring solutions for AWS, Azure and SQL
Server environments. They are integrated with native interfaces and collect data about availability, cost and many other environment-specific indicators.
3. Zabbix
Zabbix is a free and open source Linux server monitoring tool. It is an enterprise-level monitoring solution that helps monitor servers, networks, cloud services, applications and services. One of its most important advantages is that it can be configured directly from the web interface without having to manage text files like other tools like Nagios.
Zabbix provides a variety of indicators in its
server management software, such as CPU usage, free disk space, temperature, fan status, and network status. In addition, it also provides ready-made templates for popular servers (such as HP, IBM, Lenovo, Dell) and operating systems (such as Linux, Ubuntu and Solaris).
By setting up complex triggers and dependencies for data collection and alerts, Zabbix's monitoring capabilities have been further enhanced.
4.Datadog
Datadog is a unified monitoring platform for servers, applications and stacks. Datadog was rated as a leader in smart applications and server monitoring in 2019 by the Forrester Wave. Datadog has a centralized dashboard that combines many indicators.
Datadog's monitoring functions include monitoring functions required in the fields of
server and source code control and error tracking. It also promotes many metrics, such as traffic by source and container in a cloud native environment. Notifications can be obtained via email, Slack and many other channels.
Mapping dependencies and application architecture across teams allows Datadog users to fully understand how applications and data flows work in large environments.
5. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
SolarWinds monitors your server infrastructure, applications, databases and security. Its system management software provides monitoring solutions for servers, virtualization, disk space, server configuration and backup.
The main advantage here is that because SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor have a large number (1,200+) predefined templates for multiple types of servers and cloud services, they can get started in a few minutes. These templates can be quickly customized to fit almost any type of setup.
SolarWinds has a comprehensive monitoring system that can be used for virtual servers across local, cloud and hybrid environments to overcome VM Sprawl issues and must switch to other tools. Tools can be used for capacity planning, event monitoring, and data analysis with alerts and dashboards.
6. Paessler PRTG
Paessler Router Traffic Grapher is a server management software that uses SNMP, packet sniffing and Netflow. PRTG can satisfy both Windows server and Linux environment. A variety of server monitoring software applications are available for services, networks, clouds, databases, and applications.
The PTRG server monitoring solution is suitable for web servers, database servers, mail and virtual servers. Cloud monitoring is the strength of PTRG, which provides centralized monitoring systems for all types of IAAS/SAAS/PAAS solutions (such as Amazon, Docker, and Azure).
PTRG monitors firewalls and IP to ensure inbound and outbound traffic. If network security is compromised, it will provide regular updates and automatic notifications about the status of the firewall through integrated web and mobile applications.
7. OpenNMS
OpenNMS is a completely open source server monitoring solution released under the AGPLv3 license. It is built for scalability and can monitor millions of devices from a single instance.
It has a flexible and extensible architecture that supports extended service polling and performance data collection frameworks. OpenNMS is supported by a large community and commercial support from the OpenNMS Group.
OpenNMS combines monitoring of multiple types of servers and environments by standardizing specific messages and distributing them through powerful REST APIs. You can get notifications via email, Slack, Jabber, Tweets and Java native notification policy API. OpenNMS also provides ticketing integration with RT, JIRA, OTRS and many other products.
8. Retrace
Retrace has powerful monitoring functions and a high degree of scalability. It is recommended for new teams with no experience, because it will provide smart default values based on your environment. This program allows you to be one step ahead in monitoring servers and applications.
It monitors application performance, error tracking, log management and application metrics. Based on multiple monitoring thresholds and notification groups, Retrace notifies relevant users through SMS, email and Slack alerts.
The custom dashboard allows Retrace to provide overall and detailed data about the health of the server. These dashboard widgets collect data about CPU usage, disk space, network usage, and uptime. Retrace supports Windows servers and Linux.
9. Spiceworks Network Monitor
Spiceworks is a simplified free server monitoring software for server and network monitoring. The connectivity dashboard can be set up on any server in a few minutes, and after configuring the application URL, you can start monitoring immediately.
You will be able to receive real-time insights on slow network connections and application overloads both locally and on the cloud. You will be able to solve the problem before it becomes troublesome. One of the disadvantages is that there is no proper notification mechanism. Spiceworks has promised to resolve this issue as soon as possible through email alerts for server and application events.
The monitoring solution is fully integrated with Spiceworks IT management cloud tool suite, and free support is also provided through online chat and telephone.
10. vRealize Hyperic
vRealize Hyperic is an open source tool of VMware for server and network monitoring, which provides monitoring solutions for multiple operating systems. Including middleware and applications in physical and virtual environments.
Infrastructure and OS application monitoring tools enable users to understand the availability, utilization, events, and changes of each layer of the virtualization stack (from the vSphere hypervisor to the guest OS).
The middleware monitor collects thousands of metric data, which can be used for application performance monitoring. The vRealize Operations Manager application provides centralized monitoring for infrastructure, middleware and applications.
11. Icinga
Icinga has a simple set of goals to monitor availability, provide access to relevant data and issue alerts to keep users informed. The integrated monitoring engine can monitor large-scale environments, including data centers.
The fast web interface allows you to access all relevant data. Users will be able to build custom views by grouping and filtering individual elements and combining them into custom dashboards. With this setting, you can quickly take measures to solve all the problems found.
Notifications arrive via email, SMS, and integrated web and mobile applications. Icinga is fully integrated with the VMware environment and obtains data about hosts, virtual servers, databases and many other indicators and displays them on a clean dashboard.
12. Instrumental
Instrumental is a clean and intuitive application that monitors your servers and applications. It provides monitoring capabilities across multiple platforms (such as AWS and Docker), multiple database types, and application stacks (such as .Net, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby).
In addition to the native methods that can be used to collect data, Instrumental also integrates with many other platforms such as Statiste, telegraf, and StatsD. The built-in query language allows you to transform, aggregate, and time shift data to fit any visualization you need.
The specially designed dashboard interface allows viewing overall data and in-depth study of each server and application. Instrumental provides configurable alerts via email, SMS and HTTP notifications based on changes in indicators.
13. Tornimo
Tornimo brings real-time monitoring with unlimited zoom. It is an application monitoring platform compatible with Graphite, and its front end is built on the Grafana dashboard. It also supports switching from a custom Graphite deployment or many other compatible SaaS platforms in minutes.
Tornimo uses a proprietary database system, and as the environment grows, it can handle up to one million indicators. Customers trust Tornimo to monitor mission-critical systems, regardless of the amount of data that needs to be monitored, because it provides consistent response times.
Compared with many other monitoring tools, Tornimo's significant advantage is that it does not average older data to save storage space. It allows users to easily identify anomalies using older data.
14. ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine's OpManager is a trusted server monitoring software with powerful monitoring functions for all types of network nodes (such as routers and switches, servers, VMs, and almost all network nodes with IP).
With more than 2,000 built-in network performance monitors, OpManager's server monitoring tools can meet the needs of physical servers and virtual servers through multi-level thresholds and instant alerts. It provides a customizable dashboard to monitor your network at a glance.
As a server monitoring solution for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Unix, OpManager supports system health monitoring and process monitoring of many platforms (such as VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer) through SNMP and WMI.
