What is IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?
No matter where they are located, IT infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource usage of IT infrastructure components (for example, in a data center, at the edge, infrastructure as a service [IaaS], or platform as a service [PaaS] in the cloud). This makes it possible for I&O leaders to keep track of and compile statistics on the resource usage and availability metrics of both physical and virtual entities, including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, and storage. Notably, these technologies perform historical data analysis or trending of the variables they track in addition to real-time data collection.
BEest IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
The number of components in your infrastructure will increase as your organization expands, making manual monitoring difficult without the right tools. You need a solution that offers end-to-end visibility into the condition of your infrastructure, whether it is through performance measurements, availability status, or application component logs.
We’ll review some of the top open source and commercial IT infrastructure monitoring tools and programs to get you started.
1. Sematext Monitoring
A full-stack IT infrastructure monitoring tool called Sematext Monitoring offers real-time visibility into both on-premises and cloud deployments. By keeping an eye on your infrastructure’s inventory, servers, containers, processes, events, databases, and more, you can also evaluate how well it’s doing. To get access to containerized apps running in Docker or orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Nomad, you can utilize it for container infrastructure monitoring.
2. The Elastic Stack
Three open-source projects, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, are combined to create the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) monitoring system. While Logstash assists with injecting and transforming data from many sources before delivering it to Elasticsearch, Elasticsearch is in charge of search and analytics. Through the use of graphs and charts, Kibana makes it possible to visualize data that Elasticsearch has studied. These features can be utilized to give insights into the health of your environment and metrics gathered from various sources inside your infrastructure.
3. Prometheus
Prometheus is a well-known open-source infrastructure monitoring tool that was initially created by former Google employees with the goal of monitoring extensively containerized systems. It utilizes time-series data. The services it keeps track of ought to expose an HTTP metrics endpoint that Prometheus can check on a regular basis. This API should provide access to various metrics and their current values. In some circumstances, you can’t modify the containerized service to transmit the metrics Prometheus needs.
4. Zabbix
One of the most widely used open-source infrastructure monitoring tools available in Zabbix. It’s a flexible solution with a variety of monitoring options, including network, server, cloud, application, and database monitoring, to mention a few. Zabbix offers a wide range of visualization tools that let you assess the health of your infrastructure. To find and fix problems in real-time, you can use the tool’s alerting and remediation features.
5. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)
SAM (SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor) offers thorough monitoring of both your on-premises and cloud-based IT infrastructure. More than 1,200 apps and systems are supported out-of-the-box, and more community-contributed integration templates are also available. The program enables you to keep an eye on infrastructure parts via WMI, SNMP, PowerShell, REST API, and other methods. For Windows and Linux, SAM includes predefined OS monitoring configurations, allowing for quicker onboarding and performance monitoring. Furthermore, you don’t require numerous IT monitoring solutions.
6. N-able RMM
The remote monitoring, management, patching, automation, and other features that managed service providers require to get visibility into the varied IT environments of the clients they manage are provided by N-able RMM. With its self-healing characteristics, it can be quickly scaled to monitor thousands of infrastructure components and aid in the early detection and repair of problems. N-able RMM enrolls and adds devices to be monitored using the N-central probe technology. With technology mapping, it offers a quick overview of each customer’s environment, which is useful for managed service providers who assist numerous clients.
7. Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring
Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring gives you insight into the on-premises and cloud performance status of the infrastructure components that make up your system. You can utilize Datadog’s thousands of built-in infrastructure metrics to see how your application stack, containers, virtualization platform, and other components are doing. More than 450 integrations, including well-known stacks like Kubernetes, Docker, and Apache Kafka, are supported by the tool using an open-source agent.
8. ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine With support for real-time monitoring of networks, physical and virtual servers, storage devices, and more, OpManager is a dependable infrastructure monitoring program. The software offers a thorough view of overall network performance in addition to performance monitoring of hosts and VMs in your infrastructure and customizable dashboards with over 200 performance widgets. Utilizing a variety of thresholds, OpsManager can be used for proactive server monitoring (i.e., the performance can be checked at various levels).
9. PRTG Network Monitor
An infrastructure monitoring solution called PRTG Network Monitor gives you significant network, server, virtual machine, and application monitoring capabilities. Both agent-based and agentless monitoring is available. WMI, SNMP, SSH, and NetFlow are a few of the technologies used by agentless monitoring to gather metrics data. For high-level visibility, PRTG has a dashboard that allows you to view alerts, outages, and warnings all in one place. It also includes user-friendly business process sensors that let you keep an eye on the IT infrastructure components used in a particular business process.
10. Nagios
One of the first infrastructure monitoring tools, Nagios is still in use today and is offered as both an open-source application (Nagios Core) and a commercial enterprise solution (Nagios XI). Because of its architecture, the Linux-based Nagios Core is particularly well-liked because it can be expanded with both official and independently created custom plugins. Applications, system metrics, operating systems, and other infrastructure parts can all be centralized and monitored with Nagios. Another plus is its broad reporting features, which include historical data and availability reports that may be expanded via add-ons from other parties.
11. WhatsUp Gold
For full-stack monitoring, WhatsUp Gold is a network monitoring system that can be expanded through modules to monitor apps and infrastructure parts. It offers comprehensive monitoring features for your VMware or Hyper-V-hosted virtual environment. WhatsUp Gold provides information on host and guest CPU, memory, disk, and network consumption from a single interface. This tool tracks network performance as well as the bandwidth usage of your application’s constituent parts.
12. New Relic
A full-stack monitoring solution called New Relic provides you with powerful dashboard features and visibility into the operation of your infrastructure components. With New Relic, you can monitor data from logs, infrastructure, applications, serverless functions, and more—all from a single tool—instead of having to switch context between many applications. Key host metrics including CPU, RAM, disks, and network status may be tracked in real-time using New Relic. The insights feature of New Relic makes it simple to track and search through infrastructure monitoring data.
13. Dynatrace
A thorough monitoring platform is offered by Dynatrace that can cover your infrastructure in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid settings. This includes naming a few, host machines, servers, storage, network, and Kubernetes clusters. A single agent, installed on each host, is used to gather the monitoring data. This agent can monitor servers, applications, services, databases, and more. By turning on the infrastructure monitoring mode, you can configure the agent to perform physical/virtual infrastructure-focused monitoring. Either the hosted SaaS service or your own hybrid cloud can be used to implement the Dynatrace stack.
14. AppDynamics
In both cloud-native and hybrid systems, AppDynamics offers a complete infrastructure monitoring solution that includes server, storage, and network components. It can be installed locally or used as a SaaS service. By associating user experience and business outcomes (the tool’s primary focus) with events gathered from your infrastructure, you can use AppDynamics to prevent downtime. The full-stack monitoring capabilities of this tool make it possible to connect application performance problems with low-level infrastructure impediments, hastening root-cause investigation and remedy.
15. Site24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring
A monitoring tool located in the cloud, Site24x7 can keep an eye on infrastructure elements like servers. Networks, containers, and virtualization platforms. It needs an agent to be installed on the server being watched. Whether it is hosted on-premises or in the cloud. Site 24×7 is able to gather all pertinent metrics from Linux. And Windows servers provide the data in a single console. This contains crucial Linux server performance indicators like load average. And thread and handles the count of processes. As well as CPU, memory, and disk utilization, services, and process health for Windows.
What are the Best IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools for You?
Your infrastructure monitoring software should offer a bird’s-eye view of the health of your IT environment. Including performance, bandwidth availability, utilization, and security. Regardless of how or where the application is hosted, it should be able to produce infrastructure warnings based on the tracked metrics and produce reports that deliver insights. While some solutions offer full-spectrum monitoring with customizability. Others are more focused on particular elements of this (such as performance measurements).
In any event, the difficulty of setup is a decisive element when selecting an IT monitoring program. While some solutions are already integrated with your infrastructure components out of the box, others require extra configuration work.
In an effort to gain greater freedom and avoid vendor lock-in. You might be tempted to create your own monitoring tools. However, over time, this will make it more difficult to maintain your code base. And will necessitate more work every time you wish to add new features. In deciding whether to develop something from scratch or purchase one. It is always preferable to take into account the pertinent monitoring metrics. Before making the purchase of a proven monitoring tool.
Sematext Monitoring, our infrastructure monitoring product offers full-stack visibility for your IT system. It can give you an idea of what such a tool can accomplish for you. You can use the 14-day free trial to test out all of its features.
