Network diagnostics software enables IT and security teams to monitor and diagnose performance issues, outages, and security risks across their network. When a network diagnostics tools identifies any of these issues, it alerts the relevant team member, enabling them to respond quickly and effectively.
- The global network diagnostics software market was valued at USD 1.5 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 10.2% between 2026 and 2033 to reach a total value of USD 3.4 billion.
- Growth is being driven primarily by a few key factors:
- Organizations are embracing cloud computing and hybrid architectures, which introduce more complex network configurations, as well as edge computing, which requires specialized diagnostic tools for localized performance and troubleshooting. Plus, the introduction of IoT devices into the workplace expands the attack surface and increases network traffic.
- Stringent compliance requirements and SLAs are driving the need for organizations to have detailed visibility over their network’s security and performance, respectively.
- With this in mind, we’re seeing a higher demand for in-depth, real-time visibility into network performance, health, and security—all of which can be provided by a strong network diagnostics solution.
- As the market continues to grow, we expect to see a shift from on-prem to cloud-based deployment models, more investment in automated anomaly detection capabilities, and more integration of AI to provide predictive analytics, automated analysis, and intelligent recommendations—more on this in the “Future Trends” section!
Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading network diagnostics solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about the challenges they’re facing and the features that are most useful to them, as well as interviewed executives from leading providers in the network diagnostics and wider network monitoring spaces.
You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 shortlists to the best network diagnostics products on the market in our Network Monitoring And Management Hub.
Know Before You Buy: Our Recommendations
Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your network diagnosticsimplementation:
- For busy teams: Leverage any automation and AI capabilities that your solution offers to help speed up the process of analyzing network data and responding to issues.
- For easier implementation: Choose a solution that will create a map of all the different areas of your network you want it to cover, and identify a baseline of your network’s performance. This will help minimize the number of false positives you receive and allow you to start identifying issues right away. If your solution doesn’t do this, we recommend doing it manually or with the help of mapping software before you deploy the diagnostic tool.
- For best performance: Look for a reputable vendor that offers good uptimes and SLAs, to make sure that no network issues fall through the cracks due to the diagnostic tool experiencing downtime.
- For streamlined reporting: If you have a SIEM, integrate it with your diagnostic tool. This will allow you to receive all your alerts from one place, reducing duplication of effort and minimizing alert fatigue across your team. As Perimeter 81’s Amit Baraket told Expert Insights, “Imagine that in your car, instead of having one single dashboard, you have all these different metrics on different dashboard in different places. How can you deal with that?”
- For choosing the right solution the first time around: Think about the scope of your organization’s requirements before you start comparing solutions. If you only need monitoring and alerting, you don’t need to waste money investing in troubleshooting capabilities you don’t need. If you’re after remediation workflows or guidance, make sure you check with providers that they offer it, and whether it’s an add-on or included in the main price.
How Network Diagnostics Software Works
Network diagnostics tools are typically deployed by installing agents on network devices, such as routers, switches, hubs, firewalls, and access points. These agents collect telemetry on network performance, availability, and reliability, then send that data to the solution’s management portal. They also automatically notify admins of any issues, so the relevant team member can sign into the portal to investigate the problem.
The management portal can be cloud-based or hosted on-prem, and once the agents send the telemetry data there, the solution typically displays that data in a series of real-time and historical reports that are easy for IT and security admins to access and analyze. This makes it easy for them to identify issues across the network, including their root cause, so that they can quickly decide what remediation action to take. For example, if an alert shows a sudden spike in network users, admins could use the platform’s historical traffic reports to identify that spike as a DDoS attack, and take the necessary remediation action.
Some network diagnostics tools also offer automated remediation workflows for issues that are more straightforward to solve, or remediation recommendations. For example, if the tool identifies a vulnerability in the network, it may suggest updating a certain piece of software or hardware to mitigate the risk of that vulnerability being exploited.
Benefits Of Network Diagnostics Software
There are four main benefits to implementing a network diagnostics or monitoring solution:
- Gain clear visibility of all the devices connected to your network.
- By creating a topology map of your network, a network diagnostics or monitoring tool helps you identify all your network assets. This makes it much easier for you to identify performance and security issues.
- “You need to understand all of your own assets that you have to look after, the risks that you face from the outside world, and the risks you face from the inside,” – Jamie Moles, Senior Technical Manager at ExtraHop told Expert Insights in an exclusive interview. “Getting yourself in a position where you know what you have to manage is the single most important thing you have to do as a security manager or CISO.”
- Identify and respond more efficiently to security threats.
- Diagnostic tools use a combination of techniques, including real-time monitoring, traffic analysis, and configuration monitoring, to identify deviations from baseline performance and other issues—some of which could be indicators that the network has been breached.
- By alerting you to these issues, network diagnostics tools make it much easier and quicker for you to investigate and remediate any potential threats.
- “If you’re monitoring from the network—seeing everything that happens in your organization, shining a light on all of the traditionally dark areas of the network where you wouldn’t ordinarily monitor—then you’ve got a much greater chance of catching the cybercriminals. As they move through your network, they leave a forensic trail of breadcrumbs. All you need to do is find it. And if you find it, you can stop them.” – Jamie Moles, ExtraHop
- Prevent network downtime.
- Diagnostic and monitoring tools typically provide reports on the performance of each network component. This allows you to quickly identify and remediate and performance issues that could result in downtime.
- You can also use these reports to anticipate the need for an upgrade or change of network infrastructure, minimizing downtime caused by waiting for a faulty component to be replaced.
- Reduce your team’s workload.
- By alerting you to issues automatically and providing you with in-depth performance and security reports, network diagnostics tools minimize the time it takes for you to identify, investigate, and respond to issues.
- Some tools even offer AI-driven analysis, automated remediation workflows, and/or guided remediation to further streamline these processes and reduce your team’s workload.
Common Network Diagnostics Challenges
There are three main challenges that you might come across when implementing a network diagnostics solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:
- Network diagnostics tools provide you with large volumes of data, which can make it difficult to spot issues. To avoid this “data overload” and potential alert fatigue, make sure you configure your solution’s alerts to notify you of the events that are of the most importance to your team.
- If the solution doesn’t cover all your network assets, you could be left with blind spots and issues that go undetected. We recommend conducting a thorough analysis and creating a visual topology map of your network, so you can quickly see that your solution is covering each part of it. Some network diagnostics solutions do this for you on deployment; if your chosen solution doesn’t, consider implementing another tool such as a packet tracer to help you with it.
- It can be challenging to integrate monitoring agents within a complex network, particularly if you’re using legacy systems or some of your network components aren’t compatible with the diagnostic tool. To avoid this, identify which components you need to deploy an agent to before investing in a diagnostic tool, and make sure your chosen tool is able to support each of those component types.
Best Network Diagnostics Software Providers
Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of network diagnostics solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:
- Top Network Diagnostics Tools
- Top Network Monitoring And Management Software
- Top Network Traffic Monitoring Solutions
- Top Network Management Solutions
Features Checklist
When comparing network diagnostics solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:
- Real-time monitoring: The solution should continuously track network performance metrics to detect issues as they occur. This should include bandwidth usage, application traffic, latency and packet loss, and the performance of routers, switches, firewalls, and interfaces. Some solutions also offer user activity monitoring.
- Security event detection: The solutions should identify and notify you of any abnormal patterns that may indicate intrusions or DDoS attacks.
- User experience monitoring: Depending on your use case, you may want a solution that measures performance from the end-user perspective to assess the quality of the service you’re providing.
- End-to-end path visibility: The solution should trace data paths across the network to pinpoint where issues arise.
- Automated alerts: The solution should automatically send you notifications when it detects an anomaly from baseline activity or when a network threshold is breached.
- Reporting: You should be able to access reports into historical performance data for trend analysis and regulatory compliance, as well as real-time, customizable performance and network activity reports that will help you identify anomalies, performance issues, and potential threats at-a-glance.
- Root cause analysis: The solution should use correlation and AI/ML to identify the underlying source of network problems, making it easier for you to prevent the same problem from re-occurring once you’ve fixed it.
- Multi-vendor support: The solution should integrate with hardware and software from various network equipment manufacturers to help avoid blind spots.
- Integrations: The solution should integrate easily with your existing ITSM, SIEM, logging, and alerting systems.
- Scalability: The solution should be able to handle network growth and increasing data volumes without impacting its performance.
Future Trends: Where Is The Network Diagnostics Market Headed?
As the network diagnostics and monitoring market continues to grow, we can expect it to undergo a few key evolutions.
First, it’s likely that automated anomaly detection capabilities will become more sophisticated, leveraging machine learning models to identify more subtle performance issues that may previously have been undetectable. As a part of this, it’s likely we’ll also see a move away from static, threshold-based alerts, towards context-aware diagnostics. This will help reduce false positives and enable faster, more accurate incident response.
Second, we expect that more network diagnostics and monitoring tools will start leveraging AI to offer predictive analytics, automated root cause analysis, and intelligent recommendations for network optimization. This will further reduce the burden on IT and security teams, making network diagnostics more accessible for “lean” teams whilst empowering larger enterprises to manage performance across complex networks more proactively.
Finally, as with many areas of IT and cybersecurity, we can expect the market to shift away from on-premises deployment models towards cloud-based or cloud-native solutions, which offer more scalability, easier updates, and seamless integration with other SaaS platforms for easier management.
Further Reading
You can find all our articles on network diagnostics software in our Network Monitoring And Management Hub.
Want to jump right in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:
- Shortlist: Top Network Diagnostics Tools
- Blog: What is the Best Framework for Vulnerability Management?
- Interview: How Network Detection And Response (NDR) Can Give Businesses Greater Visibility And Reduce Their MTTR
- Interview: How Unified Network Security Can Help Break The Cybersecurity Complexity Paradox
