While it is possible to manually monitor a network (depending on the size of the network and how critical the resources on the network are), you will probably be better off using tools specifically designed for such a purpose.
Let’s take a look at best open source monitoring software for IT Infrastructure monitoring and see what works for you.
1Nagios
Nagios founded in 1999 is one of the industry leaders in providing monitoring solution from small to enterprise level of infrastructure.
Nagios is capable of monitoring almost all type of components like network protocols, operating systems, system metrics, applications, services, web server, website, middleware, etc.
Nagios runs on a Core 4 monitoring engine which provides a high level of performance by consuming fewer server resources.
You can integrate with almost any type of third-party software by
using a plugin, and most likely someone has already written the plugin.
If you are into Middleware, you can leverage Nagios to monitor WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, Apache, URL, Nginx, etc.
Features
- Centralized view of entire monitored IT infrastructure
- Its event handlers grant automatic restart of failed applications
- Multi-user access
- Selective access allows clients to view only the infrastructure components about them
- An active community of over 1 million users
- Extendable architecture
2Zabbix
Zabbix is a splendid enterprise level software designed to monitor everything from performance and availability of servers, network equipment to web applications and database.
Zabbix is used by thousands of companies worldwide including DELL, Salesforce, ICANN, Orange, etc.
Zabbix is
server-agent system architecture where you got to install the agent on a server (client) to by monitored by Zabbix server. However, you don’t need to install the agent for services like FTP, SSH, HTTP,
DNS, etc.
You can get it installed on Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.
It supports SNMP and provides better reporting.
Features
- Monitor Java application servers over JMX directly
- VM monitoring allows VMWare, vCenter, and vSpehere
- The front end has self-protection against brute force attacks
- Automation can be done by scripts in various languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java or shell scripts
- Integrates with other system management tools like Puppet, cfengine, Chef, bcfg2 to name a few
3Cacti
Cacti is another open source network monitoring tool which can be installed on Linux or Windows OS. It is connected to
RRDTool which allows us to generate graphs related to relevant network data.
It works with SNMP and presents the network statistics in the form of easy to understand charts.
Cacti require MySQL, Apache or IIS that support PHP.
Features
- Unlimited graph items can be defined for each graph optionally utilizing CDEF or data sources from within Cacti
- Auto padding support for graphs
- Supports RRD(Round-Robin Database) files with more than one data source and can also use an RRD file stored anywhere on the local file system
- User-based management and security
- Custom data gathering scripts
4OpenNMS
OpenNMS let you build a network monitoring solution for any IT infrastructure. You can collect system metrics using JMX, WMI, SNMP, NRPE, XML HTTP, JDBC, XML, JSON, etc.
With the help of OpenNMS, you can discover layer two network topologies in your network. It’s built on event-driven architecture and support Grafana.
OpenNMS got
built-in reporting which means you can view the report in
beautiful dashboard and chart. Overall, OpenNMS got a great user interface.
You can also install it in Docker.
Features:
- It is specially designed for Linux, but Windows, Solaris, and OSX are also supported
- Device Temperature monitoring
- Customizable admin dashboard
- Power Supply Monitoring
- IPv4 and IPv6 support
- Events can generate notifications via email, SMS, XMPP, and various other methods
- Geographical node map to show nodes and service outages using Open Street Map, Google Maps or Mapquest
5Icinga
Icinga monitoring framework allows you to monitor all the available systems in your network, which alerts you in the case of an alarm in many ways and provides you with a database for your SLA reporting.
Icinga, which began as Nagios Fork in 2009, got freed from the constraints of a fork and crafted Icinga 2 which is faster, easier to configure, more comfortable to scale significantly better.
Features:
- Monitoring of network services, host services, and server components
- It performs monitoring with Icinga 2 plugins
- Support for event handlers and notifications
- Phone, SMS, call and email support
- Cross-platform support for various operating systems
- Parallelized service checks
- You can choose between 2 user interfaces, Classic UI and Icinga web
- Template-based reports
