Introduction to Network Management Tool
The widespread world becomes connected to the tiny wires and sometimes turns wireless. But all the devices stay linked and works effectively to increase the productivity of the person or business. The network monitoring tools are developed every year and its utilities are launched in periodic seasons to make it advanced in the ever-changing IT monitoring. But there are some unique features like indicators to downtime and uptime, email and SMS alerting systems, customized templates, SNMP integration, NetFlow, mapping and discovering functionalities, automated network topology in networking tool to be considered as important criteria to choose the appropriate tool that fits your business. Few of the top used network monitoring tools are briefly discussed in this article.
Top 7 Network Management Tool
The important tools in network management are available with various features and it is up to the user to choose the correct one.
1. WhatsUp Gold
It is a network management tool implemented from Ipswitch and it is the highly configured tool available in the market. The dashboards are attractive which makes it user-friendly and easily customizable. The price and features of WhatsUp Gold are balanced for everyday IT management. The recurring alerts can be configured into the dashboard to monitor the IT infrastructure. The latest version of WhatsUp Gold is released in 2017 which has the combined version of performance monitoring in real-time, monitoring of hybrid cloud alerts on manual and automatic failover and gives the expanded visibility on distributed networks. But it is limited to Windows OS support. It is available with variable price plans according to the user requirement.
2. Nagios XI
It is specially designed for freelancers, wide-audience, small and medium businesses. The price model of Nagios XI is flexible and is available as an open-source, free version, and also has a single time subscription and license. It enables adaptability to plugin the tools as it has extreme flexibility. The alerts are triggered for even low cost. The significant components are Nagios XI monitors database, infrastructure, and network. The installation is easy and sometimes it consumes few steps to adapt it to user requirements. The user can configure the tool to monitor each component by using the configuration file. It can be supported only on Unix variants and Linux. For 100 nodes it charges around $1999.
3. SolarWinds
This tool can be instantly setup and the configuration is so easy. The tool automatically detects the network components and deploy them to live within an hour. It follows a simple and standard approach to monitor the entire structure of the network and its instinctive user interface as it can be easily edited and managed quickly. It can be highly customizable on web-based dashboards, views, and performance charts. It can implement a tailored architecture for the complete network infrastructure and develops customized dependency intelligent alerts.
4. PRTG
It can be used in advanced infrastructure to manage high capabilities. In the network, all the components, traffic flow, servers, and application is viewed in the hierarchical view to summarize the process and alert’s performance. It also monitors the network infrastructure which uses WMI, SSH, Packet Sniffing, SNMP, Rest API, SQL, Ping, HTTP request, and so on. It is the best choice for the new organization to monitor their network performance as it is user-friendly, highly powerful, and monitors the end to end process. The unique feature is to monitor the components in mobile applications and datacenter. The QR code that matches the printed out sensor and fixed to physical hardware. The mobile application can be implemented to scan the code to summarize the functions of the device that is viewed on the mobile screen. It has a flexible price plan and can be implemented according to the user’s choice.
5. Zabbix
It has an attractive web graphical user interface which makes it more popular and user friendly. It is available as open-source and can be completely configured. It is concentrated on trending functionalities and system monitoring. This tool is used to monitor the servers and linked network hardware. The main advantage of the tool is, it can predict the traffic and forecast the upcoming by analyzing the historical data. As it is open-source, it possesses wide community support all over the world with active users and has brief documentation support. It allows the user to utilize the open-source solutions of all components without any mandate vendor lock-ins. It is too powerful for SMB networks placed below a thousand nodes. But above that, the tool becomes slow with degraded performance. An important demerit to be included is it doesn’t have any reports and real-time tests.
6. Icinga
This tool is implemented in 2009 by the developer team of Nagios. It can be used for network and service monitoring tools in the open infrastructure. It is user friendly and flexible, especially for enterprise and SMB networks. The tool concentrates on monitoring services and infrastructure which has a report and alert functionalities, and strongly works on threshold analysis. It is famous to generate the alarm for high priority alerts and the report is pulled for every health check of the user IT infrastructure. The dependency of alerts can be viewed in the dashboard that is triggered via SMS, email, or some messaging applications. It is available as free and open-source with the firm and supportive community
7. ManageEngine OpManager
This tool is used for application performance management, network monitoring, and infrastructure management by using APM plug-in software. It is well-balanced at the time of feature analysis and heavy load monitoring. It provides an instant solution to manage the servers, network, fault configuration, performance management. It analyzes the network traffic and executes the manage engine OpManager which can instantly deploy on-premise. The glimpse of this product is it has pre-configured templates for network monitoring components. It comprises of pre-defined parameters on monitoring the server and provides specific intervals for components. The important edition is available for $595 and can be connected to 25 components.
Conclusion
Hence these are some of the top used network management tools used in all types of business environments.
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