The Top 7 Server Monitoring Software

Paessler PRTG is an all-in-one server and network monitoring software that keeps track of your IT infrastructure and servers, such as processors, memory, cooling fans, and power supplies. The software dynamically adapts to the size of your server landscape and automatically discovers and monitors virtual servers. In case a router or switch fails, PRTG quickly identifies the issue, and custom real-time alerts notify you before problems occur, minimizing downtime and ensuring system duration is short-lived or even prevented.

PRTG offers customizable notifications through email, SMS, and push notifications, enabling you to locate errors more quickly and adjust alert threshold values. This not only saves time but also helps in preventing potential crashes. By providing detailed reports and dashboards for scheduling and optimizing processes, PRTG simplifies capacity planning, enabling better decision-making for increasing capacity and improving overall system performance.

The software supports various server types, such as mail servers, web servers, database servers, file servers, and virtual servers. Predefined sensors for each server type allow you to start monitoring immediately and maintain control over your IT infrastructure. Paessler PRTG is a comprehensive and professional unified server monitoring solution for businesses that require robust oversight of their networks and servers.

Checkmk is a comprehensive server monitoring software designed for sysadmins and DevOps to ensure optimal server performance and prevent outages. This versatile solution is compatible with various server types, including web, mail, and database servers, and is capable of flexible server monitoring through its extensive library of over 2,000 smart checks. Checkmk supports almost every operating system, including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and can scale horizontally to monitor thousands of servers with its distributed monitoring setup.

The software intelligently discovers key metrics to monitor your server without additional configuration, enabling a quick setup in less than 15 minutes. The platform offers monitoring for a range of server types including mail, web, database, application, and virtual servers. Checkmk provides Linux and Windows server monitoring, focusing on critical metrics like CPU, memory, disk usage, services, processes, and network interfaces. The platform also offers integrated log management for Windows Event Log and can easily integrate monitoring for several Microsoft applications.

In addition to server monitoring, Checkmk offers centralized hardware and software asset management that automatically discovers and manages information on all servers and workstations being monitored. This feature helps identify hosts with vulnerable and outdated software versions, track changes in your environment, and integrate with your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for an up-to-date overview of your IT. The software also provides numerous visualization options and powerful dashboards for optimal data analysis. With Checkmk, you can monitor server performance, track CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk I/O, network performance, and other server-specific metrics necessary for effective server management.

Datadog’s Server Monitoring Solution focuses on collecting, correlating, and monitoring server metrics for various types of servers, including physical machines and cloud servers. The platform monitors servers in real-time, ensuring smooth application performance and helping to make informed decisions about server infrastructure.

Datadog provides comprehensive visibility into server performance, regardless of an environment’s complexity. This is achieved through supporting both cloud-based and on-premises servers. It enables users to investigate server issues at the host level through tag-based metrics and alerts, as well as identifying sources of latency by monitoring server metrics alongside application data. This comprehensive view helps to visualize server metrics, application traces, and log events in a single pane of glass.

The platform also provides tools to actively measure and optimize server performance. Users can monitor CPU and memory metrics to identify underutilized machines and improve application performance by tracking host metrics over time. This helps to optimize resources and reduce costs. Additionally, the platform’s Server Monitoring Solution offers real-time alerting for server health issues, utilizing conditional alerts to avoid alert fatigue and leveraging anomaly and outlier detection features for quick problem identification and resolution.

DataDog’s Host and Container Maps feature provides a unified view of server and container status, while synchronized dashboards help in tracking incidents across metrics using a common tagging structure. The Service Map feature allows users to map application data flows and dependencies in real time, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of their infrastructure health.

Server monitoring is a crucial process for businesses as it keeps track of server system resources; this includes CPU usage, memory consumption, I/O, network, and disk usage, helping to maintain optimal server performance and prevent downtime. As an effective server monitoring tool, OpManager can automate, simplify, and streamline this process.

The platform offers continuous monitoring of servers and their critical applications, services, and processes. It uses both SNMP and WMI protocols to ensure optimal performance. The tool can store all data to deliver historical tracking and troubleshooting, thereby eliminating the need for multiple server monitoring tools.

OpManager not only provides real-time server performance monitoring, but also monitors server availability and health, making use of proactive, multi-level thresholds to alert IT teams to potential issues. Additionally, it offers a range of additional features, including application performance monitoring, VMware ESX server and guest OS performance tracking, Exchange server performance monitoring, and URL and website monitoring. These features allow businesses to effortlessly monitor their servers and maintain peak performance.

Microsoft’s System Center offers a comprehensive solution for managing data centers, allowing IT managers to efficiently control their IT infrastructure across various environments and platforms. With System Center, businesses can simplify deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of infrastructure as well as virtualized software-defined data centers, ultimately enhancing agility and performance.

System Center supports the management of diverse infrastructures, integrating workloads on Windows Server, SQL Server, Linux, Azure Stack HCI, VMware, and Hyper-V. Its hybrid management feature enables accelerated innovation through the use of Azure management. Additionally, the platform enables the deployment and management of software-defined data centers with solutions for networking, storage, computing, and security.

With automation and self-service as core features, System Center leads to increased efficiency within organizations through automated workflow processes and convenient self-service options. The platform assists in diagnosing and troubleshooting infrastructure, workload, or application issues. This ensures reliability and high performance across the IT environment.

Nagios is an effective server monitoring solution that can monitor a wide range of server types, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Mac OS X. The platform offers flexibility by enabling server monitoring with or without agents. The platform has more than 3,500 add-ons that are available through the Nagios Exchange community to cater to diverse monitoring needs.

With Nagios, users can benefit from increased server, service, process, and application availability, coupled with the fast detection of network outages, server failures, protocol failures, and failed processes or batch jobs. The Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine ensures efficient and scalable monitoring, while users can also access automated trending, capacity planning graphs, and proactive alerts to identify and resolve potential infrastructure issues. Alerts can be delivered through email, SMS, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.

Nagios offers a customizable GUI that allows users to personalize layout, design, and preferences based on individual requirements. The platform can be extended further using community add-ons and APIs for integration with in-house and third-party applications. Managing user accounts and privileges becomes more straightforward with advanced user management features, ensuring clients only access authorized infrastructure components. Nagios also provides easy configuration through wizards that do not require intricate monitoring knowledge, making it a user-friendly option for server monitoring.

Zabbix is a server monitoring solution with a comprehensive set of features that offers administrators flexibility in choosing the most suitable options for different operational environments. Some key server performance metrics monitored by Zabbix include high CPU or memory utilization, network bandwidth usage, packet loss rate, and server availability metrics such as free disk space and system status. Additionally, Zabbix monitors configuration changes such as new components, firmware upgrades, and interface changes.

Zabbix offers various data collection methods and protocols, including SNMP, IPMI, active/passive modes, and IPv6 support. The solution provides flexible and extendable data gathering with calculated and aggregated metrics, and preprocess collected data. Auto-discovery features allow for detection of network devices and configuration changes. Zabbix also includes templating capabilities for convenient monitoring of metrics and mass-updating of similar network devices.

For problem detection, Zabbix offers flexible trigger expressions, multi-level trigger dependencies, proactive network monitoring, and problem severity levels. Notifications can be sent through multiple delivery methods and customized based on recipients, with event correlation to reduce noise in notifications. The Zabbix API enables integration with third-party software and task automation, while Zabbix proxy supports distributed monitoring and high availability, ensuring optimal performance and secure monitoring traffic encryption.