Hardware monitoring software plays a crucial role in ensuring the optimal performance and longevity of hardware components. They offer admins a comprehensive view of the health, performance, and potential issues within their systems. This makes hardware monitoring tools indispensable for IT professionals, enabling proactive maintenance and troubleshooting, and ensuring peak performance of computing systems.
Hardware monitoring software typically provides a suite of features designed to gauge and report on various system metrics. These real-time metrics can be compared to baseline or expected levels, allowing you to identify systems that are running abnormally. Monitoring solutions commonly record CPU temperature, fan speed, voltage levels, memory usage, disk activity, and GPU performance. Having real-time data on these parameters can be the difference between smooth system operation, unexpected downtime, or even critical hardware failure.
Good hardware monitoring tools should deliver automated alerts to notify users of potential problems before they become critical, such as overheating, overloading, and malfunctioning systems. Hardware monitoring tools are designed to predict these issues, offer insights on wear and tear, and suggest optimal settings for performance and longevity. For businesses especially, where downtime can lead to substantial financial losses, these tools are not just convenient, but vital.
Given the sheer importance of ensuring hardware operates consistently and effectively, we’ve curated a list of the top hardware monitoring software. This guide will highlight the standout features of each software solution, based on features, market research, and user reviews.
Checkmk is an IT monitoring platform designed for hybrid IT infrastructures, including on-premises networks, servers, and native cloud applications. The platform allows you to identify and inventory all hardware and software components, monitoring changes as you go. Checkmk will regularly and consistently monitor data and metrics, including CPU utilization and disk usage. A customizable dashboard allows you to delve into specific metrics and identify areas that need further attention. The comprehensive platform includes support for monitoring applications on major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Checkmk offers dynamic workload monitoring, enabling users to map cloud infrastructure in real-time, monitor basic cloud applications across domains, computing, networking, and storage, whilst maintaining visibility over cloud-native services. Checkmk is a versatile platform, capable of seamless integration with other monitoring solutions, supporting data interchange, and boasting improved performance, especially in complex multi-server scenarios.
Datadog offers a SaaS-based solution for infrastructure monitoring, aimed at delivering detailed insights into infrastructure performance. The solution provides metrics, visualizations, and alert systems that assist engineering teams in the management and optimization of on-premise, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud environments. Datadog integrates with a range of vendor-backed platforms, including Kubernetes and other serverless technologies. Datadog’s compatibility extends to over 500 other widely recognized technologies and applications.
One of Datadog’s key features is an intuitive interface that removes the need for a specific query language. It offers ML tools designed to identify and highlight critical issues, minimizing alert noise and false alerts. Users can also benefit from Datadog’s ability to track an extensive array of infrastructure metrics, retain historical records irrespective of the infrastructure’s current status, and efficiently troubleshoot through correlating related data points. The “Metrics without Limits” feature allows metric ingestion with flexibility in indexing, ensuring precise and accurate results. Additionally, Datadog offers advanced metric collection options such as globally accurate percentiles and Live Process monitoring, ensuring a comprehensive overview of infrastructure performance.
Icinga is a comprehensive monitoring solution designed to oversee modern IT infrastructures, such as servers, applications, and networks. The platform enables users to monitor the health, operation, and performance of their systems and applications. If an error is detected, Icinga quickly notifies relevant users, facilitating faster localization and resolution. Icinga’s versatility extends to its integration and scalability. It effortlessly blends with existing infrastructures and DevOps tools.
For server monitoring, Icinga supports a range of systems, including Linux, Unix, and Windows in both on-premises and cloud-based deployments. On the application front, Icinga caters for standard LAMP stacks to advanced distributed Java applications. The platform also provides network monitoring capabilities and insights into potential issues that may affect bandwidth, thereby helping to minimize downtime. Through an extensive library of plugins and customization options, Icinga suits varied enterprise requirements.
ManageEngine OpManager is a comprehensive network monitoring solution aimed at the business market. The platform provides real-time monitoring of network health and performance, capturing data for over 2,000 metrics, including switches, routers, servers, firewalls, and other hardware components. With an extensive library of over 53,000 vendor templates, OpManager can monitor and manage equipment from a broad range of vendors including Cisco, Juniper, Fortigate, and Aruba. In addition, it offers support for hybrid networks, encompassing systems like Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix XenServer.
OpManager’s interface boasts real-time alerting and interactive dashboards that are customizable with over 100 widgets. It also provides advanced network visualizations such as 3D floor views and rack views. This level of customization allows you to configure the platform in a way that suits your organization, with notifications in the areas you need to pay particular attention to. Not only does OpManager have the capacity to handle up to 10k devices and 50k interfaces, but it is highly scalable and provides enterprise-grade security. The platform integrates with other ManageEngine products and third-party tools via REST API, and its capabilities can be extended through add-ons and plugins.
Nagios XI is an IT infrastructure monitoring solution designed to oversee all vital infrastructure components, from applications, services, and operating systems to network protocols, and broader network infrastructure. The platform is designed to be efficient, scalable, and streamlined. It also offers a unified view of IT operations, with comprehensive dashboards and tailored views to grant quick information access via a web-based platform. This dashboard is highly customizable, allowing users to build an interface that works for them.
Nagios supports multi-user access, ensuring stakeholders have relevant infrastructure views, with advanced user management for simplified administration. Automated trending, capacity planning graphs, and alert systems help organizations anticipate infrastructure requirements and swiftly address any issues. The platform’s architecture is designed for expansion, with multiple APIs for integration and a wealth of community-developed applications. This tool can be further enhanced by integrating third-party addons, enabling it to monitor an extensive range of in-house applications, services, and systems.
New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring provides a unified system to monitor both infrastructure and application performance. It allows users to visualize relationships between infrastructure and application performance, aiding in quick identification and resolution of potential issues. Users can view the status of hosts, events, and alert activities, thereby ensuring they have a comprehensive understanding of their system’s health. Embedded change tracking provides insights into the effects of application deployments on hosts, making it easier to pinpoint and address problems as they arise, then revert to previous workflows.
New Relic provides a centralized hub for infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). Within this hub, users can observe CPU and memory utilization for hosts, containers, and VMs. Dynamic charts highlight correlations between performance drops and respective metrics. This integration seeks to improve communication between teams, tools, and data, resulting in improved application uptime. The platform operates on a consumption-based pricing model ensuring that users only pay for what they use, without peak billing.
PRTG Network Monitor is an on-premises solution designed for comprehensive monitoring of an organization’s network. It is suitable for both small and medium-sized environments and offers an all-encompassing view of the IT infrastructure from a centralized dashboard. The platform provides an expansive feature set, allowing users to oversee systems, devices, and traffic in IT, OT, and IoT infrastructures without vendor restrictions. An automatic network discovery feature facilitates initial setup, while custom dashboards give users an in-depth overview of their entire infrastructure. Real-time alerts can be delivered through multiple notification channels, including email and push notifications.
The platform supports highly customizable reports and offers different user interfaces for web, desktop, and mobile use. As an on-premises installation, it grants users full administrative control, from data access to maintenance, ensuring flexibility in backups, updates, and configurations. Offering a transparent licensing system, the product comes with a perpetual license, which means users pay once to access all its monitoring features. Additionally, a year’s maintenance is included in the package.
Zabbix is a comprehensive monitoring tool designed to gather metrics from diverse sources across your network, including network devices, cloud services, databases, and applications. Capabilities range from OS-level monitoring to IoT sensors and HTTP endpoint checks. The platform is equipped with high-performance real-time problem detection, flexible definition options, root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and trend prediction. Together, these tools empower you to improve monitoring and allow you to react to small indicators, before they develop into more complex issues.
To complement its detection and alerting capabilities, Zabbix employs baseline monitoring to detect anomalies by cross-referencing current data with historical data in real-time. The platform can autonomously execute remediation scripts or commands to rectify detected issues. This streamlines the resolution process, allowing business operations to continue as normal.
Everything You Need To Know About Hardware Monitoring Software (FAQs)
What Is Hardware Monitoring Software?
Hardware monitoring software is designed to track metrics and statistics relating to your hardware components. Through careful monitoring, you can ensure that your infrastructure is operating as it should. This not only ensures that productivity remains optimized, but it gives you forewarning of any components at risk of failure. This allows you to react before a failure occurs and before other systems are affected.
Hardware needs to be monitored in a different way to digital services. This is predominantly because hardware can get worn out; over time, materials perish and performance decreases. Some of these components can be replaced or cleaned to restore normal functionality; others require more significant intervention.
Through assessing real-time statistics and rates in comparison with historical or purported baselines, hardware monitoring tools can identify which components are likely to fail. It may not be that a component completely fails, but a significant drop in efficiency will have a knock-on impact across the rest of your infrastructure, thereby affecting productivity.
How Does Hardware Monitoring Software Work?
Hardware monitoring tools gather as much data as possible, from as many sources as they can. These may include sensors and monitors within the hardware, such as battery data, voltage sensors, current (amperage), fan speeds, power, and load sensors, as well as native, in-built sensors. The hardware monitoring tool may also gather data from adjacent components. By looking at a component’s impact on other technologies, you can identify whether that component is operating as it should.
Once this data has been gathered, the software can begin to analyze it. By comparing real-time rates with historical rates and averages, hardware monitoring tools can identify if a component is working correctly. There may be contextual reasons as to why a component is operating slightly below expectations, but a drastic difference could indicate that something more significant is occurring.
Some hardware monitoring tools can automate the remediation of errors. Obviously, this will depend on the specific type of error detected. It may well be that a software or configuration error is impacting a practical hardware process. In this case, the hardware monitoring solution will be able to adjust or modify the configuration, resulting in improved performance.
In other instances, the software may be unable to automatically respond. In these cases, explanatory notifications should be delivered to relevant parties. These notifications should explain what the issue is and suggest methods to resolve the issue.
What Features Should You Look For In Hardware Monitoring Software?
When selecting a hardware monitoring solution, the list of available features can be somewhat overwhelming. We’ve put together a list of the key features that all good hardware monitoring solutions should have.
- Broad Integrations – The more areas that your solution can gather data from, the more effective it will be. If you are unable to gain access to your entire security stack, the value of your information will be limited. There may be loopholes and blind spots preventing you from gaining a full picture of network status. Before investing in a solution, you should make sure that it can gather data from all your assets.
- Effective And Accurate Analysis – Once data has been gathered, you want to glean as much relevant information from it as possible. This is best achieved through advanced and accurate analysis. This will reveal which components are operating well, and which need some attention. It is at this data analysis stage where you really gain value from your hardware monitoring solution.
- Timely Notifications – Some insights will be of critical importance and need urgent attention. It is important that these insights are delivered directly to the relevant user who can do something about it. Effective delivery of notifications not only means that they are quick, but also that they are sent in a convenient and useful manner – a notification is only useful if a user is able to understand it and knows how to respond to it.
- Continuous Monitoring – The more frequently your solution is able to scan your infrastructure, the faster you are able to detect errors and misconfigurations. While your solution might not need to monitor status continuously, it should run regularly enough. Otherwise, the interval between scans will be too great, and you may miss critical errors.
