Nagios Core provides only limited monitoring capabilities, unlike Nagios XI, which is a commercial tool with added features. Once this is done, the tool offers metrics to monitor server performance, remediate services, and reporting. Nagios can be complicated to install, set up, and configure. However, one of the biggest obstacles is getting past the initial setup phase. Many IT pros consider Nagios to be cost-effective and customizable, and appreciate being able to seek support from its user community. Nagios ® is a widely used open source tool for monitoring server and network performance. Of course, that team would have to have one or more members willing to manage and maintain the monitoring system they build.īefore spending a significant portion of your IT budget on application and server monitoring tools, consider this list of the best free systems monitoring tools available today for monitoring your IT needs and environment. On the other hand, they can be useful toolkits that a development team can use to build exactly the type of monitoring tool they need. Open-source tools are sometimes too basic to monitor a system on which a business relies. Deciding which tool suits you needs best depends on what kind of infrastructure you want to monitor, how much of the stack you want to monitor, and how much time and resources you have to invest in building, integrating, and customizing a free server monitoring tool versus investing in a commercial product. There are many popular, widely used systems and server monitoring tools. SAM acts as a single pane of glass to provide complete and comprehensive server, application, virtualization, and infrastructure monitoring capabilities that complement some of the essential free tools you may already use. When we need a server monitoring tool that is easy to install, and supports monitoring and reporting out of the box, we like SolarWinds ® Server & Application Monitor (SAM). When you’ve grown past what one polling engine can do, you have to stand up an entire separate solution (complete with a separate database) rather than federating an additional poller into the existing environment.
Finally, many open-source solutions don’t scale past a single server. Another thing to consider is security, which may become an issue depending on the tool and your company’s guidelines for security. Open-source monitoring solutions often require significant investments to learn, install, configure, and use. In this server monitoring tools guide, I’m sharing some of my favorites with you below. While the debate about free versus commercial goes on, there are well-recommended, free server and systems monitoring tools that many sysadmins swear by.
#BEST FREE MEMORY MONITOR SOFTWARE#
That’s all great, but how do you pick out the best server monitoring tools in a field of hundreds? Today, there are commercial products, freeware tools, and open-source software to choose from. Even so, budgets aren’t infinite, and sometimes management mistakenly thinks they can do without because, “Everything’s running great right now, and we’ll know if it doesn’t, right?” Because most organizations live or die by their applications (whether it’s critical internally or for external customers), having the right set of tools to monitor and manage your server environment is critical. To build application infrastructure, you start with an architecture, draw the design, then analyze and choose the platform(s) that best fits. If you’re on the hunt for a free tool that can show you if your packets are passing, your routers are routing, and your NetFlow is flowing, you may want to check out my list of must-have top free network monitoring tools.
#BEST FREE MEMORY MONITOR UPDATE#
So, I think it’s time to review and update those old choices and possibly add a few new tool reviews into the mix. In 2015, we reviewed the must-have free systems and server monitoring tools, but (as everyone knows) the landscape has changed for monitoring, free tools, and IT in general.