Free network monitoring tools to monitor your network and servers

Do you know how much bandwith is being used within your network?

What about the performance of your application servers?

Are servers running at high CPU utilization all the time?

If your organization has a network of servers in place, these are some questions that your network guy should be able to answer without any problems. Photo by Docklandsboy.

If he / she goes … huh? How would I know? Then probably the network may not be monitored in any way and thus your organization risk the following:

The performance of applications could be affected if servers are running out of server resources
There may be a bottleneck bandwith which is difficult to detect
Automatic failover systems cannot be deployed

Worry about your network not being monitored? Do read this post on how to choose and effective network monitoring software (NMS) for your organization.

There are many network monitoring tools which your network team can utilize in order to monitor your organization’s network and server. The following are some free ones to try:

GroundWork Monitor Community Edition provides a essential IT monitoring solution that enables you to maintain network visibility and control. This is a single server deployment that leverages the strengths of 15 other open source projects such as Nagios, rrdtool and nmap.

It combines the results of these projects in to a system that evaluates the status, events and performance of monitored devices and presents these results in an easy to understand web application.

The Community Edition has the following key features:

Availability monitoring – alerts if devices are up or not.
Ability to monitor servers, devices and applications which gives you the flexibility to monitor all of the integral components within your network.
Performance monitoring – gives insight on latency before a server is offline
Basic auto-discovery and configuration tools to help identify additional devices on the network which is a great time-saving function if your network is constantly changing.

ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution.

ZABBIX is software for monitoring of your applications, network and servers. ZABBIX supports both polling and trapping techniques to collect data from monitored hosts. A flexible notification mechanism allows easy and quickly configure different types of notifications for pre-defined events.

Some key ZABBIX features includes:

Distributed monitoring
Auto-discovery
Scalable and flexible
Web Monitoring
Dashboard capabilities
Escalations and notifications

Nagios is the leader in system, network, and application monitoring. It’s the industry standard for good reason.It allows you to gain insight into your network and fix problems before customers know they even exist. It’s stable, scalable, supported, and extensible.

Nagios provide comprehensive network monitoring to monitor windows, linux, routers, switches, firewalls, printers, services and applications.

When there is a problem the relevant person can be notified via email, pager and cellphone. With Nagios, you can be assured that all Service Level Agreements are met.

Zenoss Core is an award-winning open source IT monitoring product that effectively manages the configuration, health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package.

The most popular IT Management project on SourceForge.Net, Zenoss software has been downloaded over 750,000 times and deployed in over 18,000 organizations in over 175 countries.

The key capabilities within Zenoss Core are:

Auto-Discovery – Scans the entire IT infrastruture nad provides a comprehensive view of the inter relationships throughout the envirenment.
Availability Management – Suite of active availibility monitors to test key resources accross the infrastructure.
Performance Monitoring – Graphing of real time threshold analysis.
Event & Log Management – Ability to aggregate log and event information from various sources mentioned above.
Others

With Splunk, you can troubleshoot application outages, investigate security incidents very quickly as it ias all integrated. Unlike traditional approaches to managing IT, Splunk is software that lets you search and analyze all your IT infrastructure data from a single location in real time.

Splunk’s integrated approach keeps infrastructure available, secure and compliant. From an operations point of view, service levels can be improved as you can recover from problems faster.

Splunk is compliant with E-Discovery, FFIEC, FISMA, HIPAA, PCI, SOX.

openQRM is a very comprehensive and flexible Open Source Infrastracture Management Solution. Its fully pluggable architecture focuses on automatic, rapid- and appliance-based deployment, monitoring, high-availability, cloud computing and especially on supporting and conforming multiple virtualization technologies.

openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT-Infrastructure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins. This provides companies with a highly scalable system that supports small companies as well as global businesses who have large server base, multi-os & high-availability requirements.

Key features includes:

Support for different virtualization technologies
High-availability : “N to 1″ fail-over
Ready-made-server-images via the image-shelf plugin
Integrated storage management

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. It uses carefully engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve very low per-node overheads and high concurrency. The implementation is robust, has been ported to an extensive set of operating systems and processor architectures, and is currently in use on thousands of clusters around the world. It has been used to link clusters across university campuses and around the world and can scale to handle clusters with 2000 nodes.

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitorize as many services as it can. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored. The current status of any corporate Linux server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

It has been designed to be used under production UNIX/Linux servers, but you can use it to monitor embedded devices, or in your laptop or even in your Linux box at home as well.

Initially all its development was created for monitoring Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS Linux, so this project was made keeping in mind these distributions. Since 0.8.0 though, is easier to port it to other Linux distributions and even to other UNIX systems like FreeBSD.

OpenNMS is an enterprise grade network management platform developed under the open source model. It consists of a community supported open-source project as well as a commercial services, training, and support organization. Some of OpenNMS’s key features includes auto-discovery, service level polling, snmp data collection, events and notifications in case of outages, dashboards.

Serio IT Service View is a free, no device limitation tool which allows you to monitor server, alert you of any problems, automatically take corrective action like rebooting, starting and stopping services within a monitored server. Works well with other standard plugins such as:

Web Page and Web Application Monitoring Plugin
Generic Ping Test Plugin
Oracle Login & SQL Exec Plugin

Serio IT Service View also has a MIB compiler and scripting language to assist you in writing your own plugins.

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There you go. A list of free network monitoring tools to monitor your network and servers. Enjoy!

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