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best nagios alternatives

Nagios is a great network monitoring tool and is widely known in the network monitoring & management sphere. It does almost everything you could possibly hope for in the network monitoring space.

Having said that, it doesn’t hurt to take a look around every once in a while, to see what the competition has to offer – especially if your looking for a less complicated solution to configure and manage!

In our round-up, we will see just what it takes to compete in today’s market and what these other solutions have to offer.

Here is our list of the best network monitoring alternatives to Nagios:

  1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor – FREE TRIAL This software package uses SNMP to keep a constant eye on all network devices and alert for performance problems. Runs on Windows Server. Download a 30-day free trial.
  2. Site24x7 – FREE TRIAL A cloud-based system that offers network, server, application, and Web asset monitoring in packages that suit businesses of all sizes. Sign Up for a 30-day free trial.
  3. ManageEngine OpManager – FREE TRIAL A monitoring system for networks, servers, and virtualizations that has an option for centralized WAN supervision. Available for Windows Server and Linux. Download a 30-day free trial.
  4. Paessler PRTG – FREE TRIAL A package of monitors for networks, servers, and applications that includes great performance visualizations. Available for Windows Server. Download a 30-day free trial.
  5. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor – FREE TRIAL This on-premises solution offers application dependency mapping and performance tracking for both on-site and cloud resource monitoring. Runs on Windows Server. Download a 30-day free trial.
  6. Zabbix A free system tool that offers network, server, service, cloud platform, and application monitoring. Runs on Linux. macOS, and Unix.

On the open source front we have Zabbix to analyze and see how it works as well. Let’s get started!

Here’s the Best Nagios Alternatives for Network Monitoring in 2024:

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) – FREE TRIAL

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a tool that makes the life of a network administrator much easier. It is able to monitor and alert you about any issues or problems on your network, with very little delay. You are able to monitor many different objects and sources such as applications, services, VPN tunnels, and much more.

It features Network Availability Monitoring, Critical Path Visualization, Intelligent Mapping, Performance Analysis and Advanced Alerting. This means that you can configure it and set it up to match your requirements. For instance, you can configure it as a Cisco Network Monitoring Tool.

This will give you the ability to monitor and analyze faults, availability and the performance of the Cisco device itself.

You can also use this application as a Cloud Server Monitor. Because of the remote nature of Cloud services and infrastructure it can be challenging to see if everything is running as it should be. For this reason, SolarWinds NPM allows you to Visualize the full network path of the device from the device itself all the way to its end point.

This is achieved with cloud monitoring by NetPath.

Other important features that this product offers includes Deep Packet inspection and analysis.

This allows you to gain greater knowledge about the current state of your network, as well as the state of traffic and data flow.

If you would like to try it out for yourself then you can find the details on how to download a free trial. All you need to do is give them your details and they will email you a link so that you can download and test it out for yourself.

Pricing & Download: You will have to check their website for pricing. You can register for a 30-day free trial.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Download the 30-day FREE Trial

2. Site24x7 Network Monitoring – FREE TRIAL

Site24x7 APM Monitoring

Site24x7 is a cloud platform that offers a range of system monitoring tools. Those different monitors are bundled together into packages that offer server, network, and application monitoring. The Site24x7 system has integrations, which are similar to the plug-ins of Nagios and extend the capabilities of the system to enable it to monitor specific products.

As well as monitoring physical infrastructure, the Site24x7 package is able to supervise virtual assets, such as VMs and containers. This includes VMWare, Hyper-V, Nutanix, Docker, and Kubernetes systems.

The Site24x7 package is delivered from the cloud and it can also monitor other cloud systems, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The system also has the capabilities of monitoring Web applications through real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring tools.

On site, the tool will track the performance of networks by querying network devices through SNMP. This gives you a live report on all switches, routers, and firewalls. The data from SNMP queries also enables the Site24x7 system to compile a network inventory and a network topology map.

The system can access traffic information from those devices, too, plus wireless APs. This traffic monitoring is carried out through NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX, AppFlow, and NetStream.

On-site servers running Windows and Linux are also covered by the Site24x7 monitor. All of the device metrics gathered by the Site24x7 collector can have performance thresholds placed on them. These warn of capacity issues and can be forwarded as notifications by SMS, email, push notification, voice calls, and RSS feeds.

Pricing: Prices start from $9 per month, charged annually.

Download: Site24x7 is a cloud-based system, so you sign up online. The system is available for free for 30 days by clicking on the button below.

Site24x7 Download the 30-day FREE Trial

3. ManageEngine OpManager – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine OpManager allows users to have visibility throughout all of their network infrastructure. This includes local devices on the network, wireless networks as well as WAN links. Peripherals like printers are also catered for via SNMP. OpManager also gives users the ability to troubleshoot and manage devices as well as plan for the environment and also manage configurations.

Perhaps the most attractive modern feature that ManageEngine OpManager is its mobile monitoring app. It has been created for both Android and iOS, meaning that you can install it on your iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. From these mobile devices, you can check the current status of your network as well as the devices that are connected to it. You can customize your dashboard so that only the most relevant details are available at a glance.

Download: ManageEngine OpManager is available for a 30-day free trial by clicking on the button below.

ManageEngine OpManager Download the 30-day FREE Trial

4. Paessler PRTG – FREE TRIAL

Paessler PRTG gives you the ability to monitor all of your systems and devices like networks and computers, as well as any applications that are active within your environment. PRTG will allow you to monitor your entire IT infrastructure all from one application. Everything that you could possibly need comes with this software offering. Right out of the box PRTG gets to work and no plugins or additional downloads are required. PRTG is easy to use and has some potent features that make it much easier to understand the current state of your network.

PRTG allows you to monitor bandwidth usage and see who is using the most data and causing slow internet speeds. You can monitor database performance by keeping an eye on specific areas on the database itself. It comes with customized PRTG sensors for databases and SQL queries. Application monitoring is handled by PRTG’s application features which means you can monitor specific memory and CPU and memory usage. You can download a 30-day free trial and learn exactly what your network requirements are before looking at the price list.

Pricing: Pricing starts at $1,750 for 500 sensors.

Paessler PRTG Download the 30-day FREE Trial

5. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor – FREE TRIAL

SolarWinds SAM is another epic product from this company. Server & Application Monitor is very similar to NPM but offers some extra features in a similar interface. It gives you the ability to monitor and keep tabs on your servers and the applications that are running on them. It gives you a wide array of templates that come out of the box ready to monitor common apps.

It also has support for over 200 different monitoring types. These include app servers, database servers and many other kinds of servers.

Another great feature is that SAM offers you the ability to monitor public and private networks with plenty of different tools. AppStack is an interactive mapping system that gives advanced visual representations of your environment. This makes it much easier to identify issues like performance and stability problems in servers.

AppInsights is another tool that monitors Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, IIS and SQL servers too. You can look at the key metrics of such servers which will allow you to manage and administer your server.

You can further enhance your SAM installation by adding capabilities and integrate it with additional Orion Platform applications.

You can add something like response time analysis so that you can see the root cause of failures and issues. Other capabilities include Cloud Monitoring and Application dependencies. If you want to try it out for yourself then you can download it from below!

Pricing: Download a 30-day Free Trial Today!

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Download the 30-day FREE Trial

6. Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise grade software package that is designed to give you a better picture of your network. It collects metrics for all the devices on your network like devices and systems, as well as applications. Zabbix is designed to collect metrics about many different items within your network. It does this via SNMP and IPMI agents, and it uses an agentless system for monitoring user services.

Problem detection is taken care of via smart thresholds that you define for yourself. This means that you can decide which services need the highest priority response from you. This is important for most people because mission critical systems need to be prioritized above normal user devices, as an example.

Pricing: Zabbix is free and open source, but there are costs for support.

Download: https://www.zabbix.com/download

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading about our favorite Nagios Alternatives. There are many other solutions out there, but we have chosen the best ones on the market to help you decide which monitoring solution suits your needs the best.

There are many different things to consider when deciding which product will work best for you, which is why we went through the basics of each of these options.

There is nothing quite like a hands-on demo of a product to understand how it works, so why not try a few before you decide which is best for you when looking for a Nagios replacement!