Network Monitoring And Management

The Top 10 Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions

Infrastructure monitoring solutions let you keep track key infrastructure metrics. Explore the top 10 solutions, focusing on their feature set, and with a recommendation of who they are best suited to.

The Top 10 Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions Include:
  • 1. Cisco AppDynamics
  • 2. Datadog
  • 3. Dynatrace
  • 4. ManageEngine OpManager
  • 5. Nagios XI
  • 6. New Relic
  • 7. Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
  • 8. Progress WhatsUp Gold
  • 9. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitoring
  • 10. Zabbix

Infrastructure monitoring solutions assess and communicate the health and performance metrics of IT tools across your network. This information can be used to understand capacity, usage, available storage, performance, and a range of other metrics. The solutions will gather data from a wide range of sources, including from data centers, managed services, VMs, containers, databases, and other on-premises components. The tools collect and reveal data in real time, allowing you to gain an in-depth and accurate understanding of your infrastructure status.

The data gathered through infrastructure monitoring solutions can be used by engineers to analyze and visualize key network statistics. This, in turn, allows them to ensure that network infrastructure is operating as it should, and that it is correctly configured. This data can be used to improve operational efficiency, for example to identify if more capacity is needed in certain areas, or if parts of your infrastructure are redundant.

In this article, we’ll explore the top 10 infrastructure monitoring solutions that suit a range of use cases and organization sizes. In each case we’ll highlight the tool’s key features and suggest the type of organization that would benefit most from their implementation.

Cisco Logo

AppDynamics is an observability and analysis platform acquired by San Francisco-based technology giant, Cisco. This solution empowers businesses to gain a deep understanding of how their network is running, thereby enabling them to improve and optimize performance. You can ensure that teams are working toward shared priorities, using the most accurate data. The platform provides full-stack visibility and correlation, automated data collection, and quick isolation of performance issues.

Cisco’s AppDynamics platform empowers businesses by reducing noise and identifying issues that need resolving or areas that should be optimized. The amount of data ingested by this solution allows you a comprehensive overview of your infrastructure, as well as being able to drill down into the specific details of a case. The high level of detail and accuracy that this solution enables results in organizations being able to tap into unrealized potential and make effective improvements. We would recommend this solution for medium to large organizations that require an efficient and powerful data harvesting and analysis solution.

DataDog Logo

Datadog’s observability platform empowers businesses to monitor critical data across their cloud infrastructure, enabling them to improve security, optimize processes, and increase effectiveness. The platform provides a range of detailed graphs to help visualize critical information and data. Datadog can contextualize your data in relation to similar organizations globally, can track the impact of individual processes and performance, as well as incorporating customizable metrics and behavior analysis.

The Datadog platform is one of the easiest to initially get to grips with and implement. This allows you to gain extensive visibility from day one. Due to the extensive level of visibility, if an error does occur, admins are able to witness the entire event history, thereby putting them in a stronger position to remediate effectively. Another useful feature is the way that the solution will automatically alert you to relevant metrics that need attention. We would recommend this solution for small to medium sized organizations that are looking for a robust platform with extensive visibility, a shallow learning curve and automated alerts.

Dynatrace Logo

Massachusetts-based Dynatrace have developed an infrastructure monitoring platform that combines deep observability with advanced security and AI to power efficient and accurate process automation. The observability platform uses data in context, alongside intelligent automation, to simplify your workflows, whilst ensuring that your processes remain efficient, accurate, and secure. The solution can monitor cloud, hybrid, containers, VMs, networks, servers, and storage, as well as integrating with services like AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8.

Dynatrace is a versatile solution that uses intelligent alerting to make admins aware of the most critical and relevant events. As the platform is founded on AI technology, it can greatly improve your organization’s efficiency and process optimization. One of the most useful features is the ability to share graphs and findings with relevant users – this might be with the team that an event relates to, or it could be with company executives. We would recommend this solution for medium sized organizations that need an infrastructure management tool with versatile monitoring and insightful alerts.

ManageEngine logo

ManageEngine is a leading IT management software provider, with a suite of tools to cover a range of technical needs and use cases. OpManager can monitor networks, servers, IP addresses, and switch ports to manage processes and ensure services are optimized. The comprehensive and integrated solution streamlines your processes to reduce bottlenecks, optimize performance, and ensure that your IT infrastructure is aiding productivity.

ManageEngine OpManger offers a good level of service and impressive capabilities that reduce manual workload, allowing you to streamline and optimize your processes. With unified monitoring and effective alerts, the solution gives you comprehensive visibility and insight into functionality and status. We would recommend MangeEngine OpManager for small to medium sized organizations that need a comprehensive and insightful solution.

Nagios Logo

Based in Saint Paul, MN, Nagios is a unified infrastructure monitoring and assessment solution. Nagios XI is comprised of a suite of monitoring, analysis, and logging tools that give you access to accurate and relevant information. The suite will monitor infrastructure components from applications to services, OS, metrics, and protocol. The analysis tools allow you powerful, actionable visibility across your infrastructure, allowing you to engage meaningfully and effectively with data to improve processes and efficiency.

Nagios’ suite of tools is customizable, allowing teams to tailor the solution to prioritize and highlight information that is most relevant to your organization. It uses an integrated, web-based interface which makes it easy for admins to access vital metrics and understand their network status. We would recommend this solution for SMBs who need a functional solution that is easy to run and provides useful analysis of infrastructure status.

New Relic Logo

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that allows engineering teams to visualize, analyze, and troubleshoot their network infrastructure. The solution enables teams to correlate data to identify the root cause of an issue, allowing you to reduce remediation time and improve productivity. This analysis also ensures that emerging issues are identified in real-time, from across your entire network.

New Relic’s solution is easy to use and provides comprehensive functionality. The solution provides extensive coverage and visibility, allowing engineers to understand their network in granular detail. This ensures that issues are spotted before they develop, giving you more time to find an effective resolution. We would recommend this solution for SMBs that require an effective solution that can detail the cause of an attack, allowing your team to make the relevant fixes with ease.

Paessler Logo

Paessler is a German technology company that specializes in monitoring solutions. The PRTG Network Monitor tool is a versatile solution that can monitor a wide range of tools, including devices, applications, LANs, servers, websites, and services. Real-time maps with live status information can be generated to illustrate network trends and data. The solution sends targeted, automated alerts when problems or unusual metrics are detected.

The platform is quick to initially set up thanks to features like automatic network discovery, though you do need a reasonable amount of computing capacity to install this solution. One of the features that sets this platform apart is that you can monitor and initiate actions from your phone. This further reduces the complexity of infrastructure monitoring, ensuring that the solution can fit with your way of working. We would recommend Paessler PRTG Network Monitor for organizations of all sizes that need a flexible, yet effective solution.

Progress Logo

Based in Burlington, MA, Progress is a software developer that focus on network visibility and monitoring solutions. WhatsUp Gold allows you to gain visibility and understand the performance of applications, network devices, and servers whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud. The solution creates an interactive map of all the components on your network, then provides real-time alerts to ensure that issues and anomalies can be resolved quickly. Admin can customize reports, dashboards, and configure alert notifications to suit their needs.

One of the key benefits of Progress’ solution is the user-friendly interface that makes onboarding quick and easy,. This information is precise and accurate, thereby giving you everything you need to respond effectively. This level of accuracy extends to granular control functions; alerts can be configured to be as specific or as general as you need. This helps you to focus on the information that is relevant to your specific organization and use case. We would recommend Progress WhatsUp Gold for medium to larger organizations that require a robust, powerful, and flexible monitoring solution.

Solarwinds logo

SolarWinds are leading provider of observation and management platforms for networks, databases, applications, and infrastructure. Network Performance Monitoring empowers organizations to improve service and reduce downtime through effective monitoring, cross-stack data correlation, and analysis.

SolarWinds provides comprehensive monitoring and analysis of your infrastructure, then communicates any findings through its streamlined dashboard. The solution gives admins a “top 10” list of issues that can be acted upon; this makes it easy for teams to prioritize tasks. We would recommend SolarWinds for medium to large enterprises, as well as MSPs who have a range of clients to be monitored.

Zabbix Logo

Zabbix is a Latvian software development company that have developed a flagship open-source distributed monitoring solution. The platform effectively monitors a range of your network tools. It has the ability to monitor network bandwidth usage, identify errors, as well as monitoring more practical data like device temperature and free disk space. The solution will also track firmware updates and configuration changes to give you visibility over network changes.

Zabbix is user-focused and simple to use. The dashboard can be customized to showcase the reports and metrics that are important to your organization. Zabbix’s solution greatly improves the ease of infrastructure monitoring, and results in an increased uptime. The solution has powerful reporting tools and effective integration with tools across your network. We would recommend Zabbix for medium to large enterprise organizations that require a powerful and robust monitoring solution.

The Top 10 Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions