The Top 8 Continuous Security Monitoring Tools

CloudFlare’s Magic Network Monitoring tool is a cloud-based solution designed to improve network traffic visibility, identify DDoS attacks, and provide volumetric traffic alerts. Magic Network Monitoring is part of Cloudflare’s broader network security suite, which also includes services such as DDoS mitigation, connectivity, zero trust network access, and network firewalling.

Magic Network Monitoring offers an end-to-end overview of all internal network traffic, aiding in monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintenance. The solution has extensive capabilities in identifying DDoS threats and alerting security teams to any malicious traffic so that they can quickly and effectively mitigate them. These notifications are sent via email, webhook, or PagerDuty, and can also be used to notify teams of surges in traffic volume. In terms of administration, the solution offers user-friendly deployment and management, with self-serve onboarding and step-by-step instruction guides to facilitate swift setup. Magic Network Monitoring also offers a free version for testing the product, along with a closed beta version available upon request to Enterprise, Pro, and Business plan customers.

In summary, CloudFlare’s Magic Network Monitoring tool enables organizations to improve overall network visibility, with over 209 Tbps of network capacity, combined with real-time network traffic data and analytics. We recommend this solution for organizations wanting to establish end-to-end visibility across their network traffic.

Datadog is an observability provider that offers a variety of solutions designed to give organizations clear visibility into their servers, cloud apps, databases, and services. They offer two main network monitoring products: their Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) tool provides insights into application, infrastructure, and DNS performance to help with troubleshooting, while their Network Device Monitoring (NDM) tool assesses the health and productivity of the network’s physical devices, such as firewalls and routers.

Datadog’s network monitoring tools include traffic analysis, which provides visibility into traffic flow across various endpoints, enabling security teams to identify potential issues or malicious activity. Their DNS monitoring provides valuable insights into server health, and the tools also automatically discover new devices on networks to ensure consistent and up-to-date tracking of the network’s overall health. The solutions also offer machine learning-driven insights that help forecast potential bandwidth issues, allowing IT teams to address them proactively to avoid disruptions.

In summary, Datadog’s products offer a comprehensive assessment on network health and performance, as well as traffic flow between assets. Their NPM and NDM solutions can be purchased separately, in tandem, or alongside other Datadog services for improved security, logging, and auditing. With an intuitive, user-friendly interface, Datadog is a robust network monitoring service suitable for both small businesses and larger corporations.

Dynatrace Network Monitoring is a process-centric network performance tool that helps IT teams to identify and rectify connection issues. The solution provides a comprehensive understanding of network communications between processes, highlighting areas suffering from connection problems. This is particularly useful for distributed systems across datacenters and virtualized cloud environments, as it helps DevOps teams improve interconnections between critical infrastructure components.

Dynatrace Network Monitoring provides insight into the network infrastructure’s topology. It automatically identifies infrastructure changes and monitors new machines and network interfaces, providing IT teams with an always up-to-date status of their VMs, ESXi hosts, and cloud instances. Dynatrace’s solution also offers network capacity monitoring at both host and process levels. This allows teams to identify which processes consume the most network bandwidth and have connection issues, making it easier to manage capacity. Alongside other key machine metrics, integrated network health metrics give an accurate picture of the network’s status, ensuring data throughput and connection quality are maintained.

Overall, by integrating all aspects of performance monitoring into a single tool, Dynatrace Network Monitoring empowers IT teams to visualize their entire stack, identify issues, and understand their impact across various tiers. We recommend this solution to organizations that want a better understanding of how infrastructure components interact and how user experience is affected by infrastructure problems.

Elastic Security is a comprehensive monitoring solution that collates data from the entire attack surface. It helps minimize blind spots by giving IT and security teams greater visibility and control over their infrastructure, whether on premises, cloud-based, or a hybrid combination of the two.

Elastic Security enables security teams to handle the vast amount of data distributed across different locations and clouds with efficiency, uncovering dormant threats in the process. It provides advanced functionality for cloud and application monitoring, helping to protect platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP from data theft, resource hijacking, and sabotage, while also observing container security and health. Elastic Security also offers user activity monitoring to help identify and remediate insider threats, compromised accounts, and privilege abuse, offering personalized focus on individual users as needed. The platform also offers custom security monitoring features that enable teams to visualize non-traditional data sources like APM traces, metrics, and business analytics. This allows them to track not only their organizational security posture, but also team performance.

In summary, Elastic Security in a robust continuous monitoring tool that actively monitors an organization’s infrastructure for malicious or abnormal activity, enabling IT and security teams to respond more efficiently to cyberthreats.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability is a user-centric monitoring service for web applications. It offers error detection and tracking, real-time insights into front-end health, and complete visibility of user interaction across the entire stack.

Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability monitors and reports on web vitals, reconstructing user behavior during issues and enabling faster resolution of front-end errors by grouping similar occurrences. It precisely measures performance parameters like page load times, and user interactions. It enables security teams to analyze these metrics based on business-relevant parameters such as device type or application version. Grafana’s platform also tracks error frequency and volume, investigates issues with contextual metadata, and offers JavaScript stack trace unpacking for pinpointing error origins.

For a comprehensive user interaction overview, this solution also offers user session tracking based on any criteria, reconstructs user session timelines, and even correlates front-end sessions with request traces for complete stack visibility. In terms of management, admins can create customized reporting dashboards and visualize their performance data—which is stored within the Grafana platform—for deep analysis and reporting.

Overall, Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability helps streamline front-end health monitoring, error detection, and user session tracking. We recommend Grafana’s platform as a dynamic tool for optimizing end-user web application experiences.

ManageEngine OpManager is a network monitoring software designed for larger enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It helps simplify the management and integration of IT processes by providing in-depth and real-time analysis of network performance and health, covering all connected IP-based devices.

OpManager’s key features include comprehensive monitoring of IP-based devices, and continuous vigilance over Hyper-V, VMWare, Citrix, Xen, and Nutanix HCI servers. It employs remote probes with probe-specific controls for monitoring distributed networks via a single console. Its keen network visualization capability, including topography mapping, enables IT teams to spot and address issues quickly and efficiently to help minimize disruptions. This is further bolstered by its fault management tools which send IT admins prioritized alerts supported by raw event correlation and unwanted event filtering. In terms of management, OpManager offers an intuitive, visual interface, which makes the platform navigable and straightforward to use. In addition to this, for MSPs, ManageEngine provides OpManagerMSP, which includes multi-tenant support, customer-based grouping, and dedicated dashboards.

In summary, ManageEngine OpManager is a strong solution for enterprises of all sizes that want to track their network performance, ensure the health of their network devices, and resolve any issues quickly and effectively. Its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface make OpManager a robust tool for efficient network management.

Nagios XI is an open-source enterprise server and network monitoring software. It is primarily focused on detecting and reporting potential network and system threats. With its seamless capabilities to integrate with other software tools, Nagios XI helps streamline the monitoring process, and its extensive range of available add-ons enable it to provide comprehensive visibility and security.

Nagios XI uses Nagios’ Core 4 monitoring engine to carry out high-efficiency, comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring, with an extensive range of add-ons available to extend its scope and depth. From the management portal, admins can access insights into IT networks access and IT processes, with automated alerts for any potential infrastructure issues that the platform detects. The platform offers a customizable GUI that allows admins to tailor it to their team’s preference and needs. It further streamlines management through its easy-to-use configuration wizards and user-influenced configurations. Finally, Nagios XI also supports community add-ons and APIs that enable it to integrate seamlessly with other third-party applications.

Overall, Nagios XI is a powerful network and system monitoring solution. Its robust monitoring engine enables efficient and scalable monitoring, that’s straightforward to manage and highly customizable. We recommend Nagios XI as a comprehensive solution for efficient, proactive IT system and network monitoring.

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a comprehensive tool designed to monitor and troubleshoot multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem infrastructures in real-time. The platform offers a broad range of functions that make it easier for IT and security teams to visualize their networks, analyze performance, and quickly resolve any issues.

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring offers real-time metrics visualization, with over 300 integrations with other third-party tools and applications. It also incorporates advanced Kubernetes monitoring, enabling automatic discovery of Kubernetes objects plus their health and performance status. The platform provides pre-built dashboards that offer at-a-glance insights into infrastructure health and performance, giving IT and security full-stack visualization. It also supports real-time troubleshooting, with the ability to accurately alert on dynamic thresholds, multiple conditions, and complex rules. This helps to significantly reduce Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time To Respond (MTTR). Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a highly scalable solution that can manage billions of events without overlooking any critical data. In terms of administration, the platform offers centralized management with programmable APIs for self-service deployment.

Overall, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a robust platform for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. We recommend it as a strong tool for businesses looking to efficiently track performance, reduce their total cost of ownership, and align their IT operations with business priorities effectively.