12 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure

IT infrastructure monitoring software gives businesses a centralized platform to monitor their complete IT infrastructure, which is one of its most amazing advantages.

In addition to expediting the monitoring procedure, it provides valuable insights about system performance to assist businesses in making decisions and preventing possible problems.

Overview of Monitoring Software

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software has become increasingly essential in today’s technology-driven world, where system performance and reliability are critical to all types of businesses, irrespective of size.

It is challenging to manually keep track of SMB and large-scale computer networks while ensuring smooth and secure operation, so IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software comes into the picture to overcome this challenge.

These tools are well-equipped and cost-effective to monitor an IT infrastructure’s health, performance, and availability in real-time. Administrators can easily track issues before they become problems by monitoring, analyzing, and alerting network and system components using such tools.

The dynamic IT environment needs proper monitoring, availability, and security to ensure seamless operation. Such tools even empower DevOps teams by providing them greater flexibility and scalability to monitor the health of the entire technology stack.

As IT needs and infrastructure varies from company to company, and there are various paid and open-source tools, it would be challenging to pick the right one for your infrastructure.

In the below section, we have discussed the top open-source monitoring tools with their features. It will help you understand how these tools work and which would suit your infrastructure.

Nagios

Nagios monitors your entire IT infrastructure, quickly sorts log data, or analyzes your bandwidth. With reliable solutions for data collecting, NetFlow analysis, and IT infrastructure monitoring, Nagios aids businesses all over the world in making smarter business decisions.

Nagios is trusted by over 9000 top customers such as Airbnb, Cisco, and Paypal.

Nagios, a renowned IT infrastructure monitoring solution, offers various downloadable products and services for SMBs to large enterprises.

The platform serves as a comprehensive resource, catering to a wide range of requirements, from monitoring servers and applications to providing network visibility and actionable insights. Its feasibility ensures seamless integration with your existing systems.

Features

• Five thousand plus different addons are available to monitor your servers.
• Checks the network for issues brought on by strained network connections or data lines.
• Monitors Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Web applications.
• Set up alerts to notify you when potential threats arise. 

Businesses of all sizes can access various Nagios software packages such as Nagios Core, Nagios XI, Nagios Fusion, and Nagios Log Server. Nagios core engine XI is used to monitor IT infrastructure quickly. Its log server is used to quickly view, analyze and archive logs from any source in one central location.

The network bandwidth is tracked using its network analyzer. Nagios Fusion gives you a centralized view of your operational status and enables quicker network-wide problem-solving.

You can try any of our solutions for free for 30 days with no restrictions. Nagios has both paid and open-source versions, and based on organizational needs, it can be downloaded. 

Zabbix

Zabbix is an award-winning, professionally developed open-source software with no limits or hidden costs. It is a comprehensive and widely-used monitoring solution, allowing businesses and organizations to keep track of their network, hardware, and infrastructure.

The platform’s versatility spans from monitoring Networks, servers, clouds, Applications, Services, and even entire data centers.

It is trusted by the world’s top organizations like Dell, ICANN, T-systems, etc. Its easy integration with various systems and extensible architecture make it a popular choice among IT professionals worldwide.

With a vast array of features and capabilities, Zabbix offers a genuinely robust monitoring experience that caters to the varying needs of its users.

Zabbix allows admins to identify and resolve critical issues and simplifies the task of maintaining performance across various systems through real-time data analysis, easy-to-use dashboards, and customizable alerts.

Features

• Ready-to-use templates to integrate your Zabbix installation with alerting, ticketing, IoT, and ITSM systems.
• Define thresholds to detect problems instantly.
• Gain additional insights and extend observability through powerful data visualization.
• Keep track of KPIs with business service monitoring.
• Enterprise-grade security.

Alexei Vladishev created the platform in 2001 to provide businesses and IT professionals with a versatile and user-friendly solution for their monitoring needs. The platform’s primary goal is to provide a reliable and efficient monitoring system, ensuring the business infrastructure remains stable and secure.

Checkmk

Checkmk is designed to monitor the entire hybrid IT Infrastructure covering servers, networks, and applications. Databases, clouds, containers, storage, IoT, etc. As per its site, it is trusted by Adobe, Fitbit, NHL, Labcorp, Groupon, etc.

Its latest 2.1 version comes with revamped Kubernetes monitoring, more integrations for your open observability ecosystem, better performance, and many more.

It has two editions- Raw, which is open source, and other is Enterprise which is premium with more features, but it is paid.

It also supports automatic network discovery and maintains the inventory of hardware and software. Regarding monitoring, the Raw edition supports the health monitoring of servers, networks, and applications.

To extend the scalability and functionality, it supports more than 2000 plugins. In addition to this, it also provides API to write your own plugins.

Checkmk software is capable enough to monitor and manage complex and hybrid IT environments and is easy to implement and use.

Top Features

• Detects issues automatically and sends an alert.
• Integration with Slack, PagerDuty, SIGNL4, and VictorOps.
• Time-series graphing and Grafana integration.
• Centralized alert management for distributed environments.

If you are looking for a single centralized dashboard to monitor, manage and administer end-to-end hybrid IT infrastructure, Checkmk will provide the solutions. Its Raw edition is free to use, and if you need additional features, you can switch to its enterprise edition.

Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana are widely used open-source tools for IT infrastructure monitoring. Prometheus is a 100% open-source tool, and its development is supported by Grafana in terms of enhancing the features to help both Grafana and Prometheus customers.

Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit, and Grafana is a cloud-based system that helps to visualize Prometheus metrics in graphs and dashboards. So both tools allow users to store large amounts of metrics they can easily slice and break down to understand how their infrastructure operates.

The Prometheus monitoring system includes a multidimensional data model and powerful query language called PromQL that collects and stores its metrics as time series data. Grafana is an IoT stack to monitor and visualize all data metrics in a single pane of the operational dashboard.

Grafana is used by more than 10M users globally by notably large corporations.

Top features of Grafana

• Centralization of the analysis, visualization, and alerting on Prometheus metrics using Grafana dashboards.
• Explore, visualize, query, and alert on your Datadog metrics in Grafana Cloud.
• Centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated architecture helps to maintain Prometheus.
• Best-in-class query performance to create real-time dashboards to share across the organization.
• Sturdy data access policies to secure and govern data.

Top features of Prometheus

• Alerts are based on Prometheus PromQL, and the alert manager handles notifications.
• It stores time series in memory and on a local disk in an efficient format
• Various integrations to bridge third-party data
• Custom libraries are easy to implement, and over ten languages are supported.

Prometheus and Grafana are the standards for monitoring services and applications. Prometheus metrics are gathered and read into Grafana Cloud. Prometheus is an open-source tool, while Grafana is free forever for three users with limited metrics.

If you want premium features and unlimited metrics, you can sign up for Grafana Pro, which has a 14-day trial period. 

Cacti

Cacti is a robust open-source monitoring and fault management tool designed to provide comprehensive monitoring solutions from LAN to complex network systems.

It can scale from a few to thousands of hosts to collect, analyze, and visualize the performance of network devices and applications.

Its core services can be deployed behind load balancers, with session management coming from its database and its structural database deployed as well in a fully fault-tolerant way.

It is widely used among network administrators and engineers who want to simplify their daily monitoring activities and ensure the efficient performance of the network.

Its effective data visualization through intuitive graphs helps IT professionals grasp the overall network performance through various network devices.

It not only helps to monitor the network devices and applications but also helps to detect and troubleshoot performance issues proactively to prevent future problems.

Features

• Uses any data collection methodology to create performance Graphs automatically.
• Supports RRD(Round-Robin Database) files with more than one data source and can also use an RRD file stored anywhere on the local file system.
• Templates and Packages to support a large number of data sources and graphs.
• Integration with MySQL/MariaDB data connections to support offline Cacti database
• Automatic discovery of network devices.

Its flexible interface and capabilities let SMBs and large corporations support the speedy detection of performance issues and make educated decisions in the context of today’s increasingly complex IT infrastructures.

Also supported by this free platform are plugins and addons that permit administrators to increase the tool’s capability.

OpenNMS

OpenNMS Meridian is a Cloud-enabled, highly scalable open-source network management platform for local and remote networks.

It is a complete solution to monitor business network performance and management in terms of network monitoring, network traffic analysis, network discovery and alerting, comprehensive fault management, alarm generation, etc.

It is employed in almost every sector, including healthcare, technology, energy, finance, government, education, retail, etc., to monitor and manage thousands of networked devices.

It is suitable to support SMBs to large enterprises, can handle up to 300,000 data points per second with flows, and is scalable to handle more.

OpenNMS comes in two open-source distributions: Horizon and Meridian. Horizon is a community release, while Meridian is an enterprise release. In addition to these two, OpenNMS provides custom graph creation through Helm and a framework that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to group related network alarms for improved troubleshooting.

It is versatile enough to support fourteen data collection protocols, so there is no need for any third-party tools. All these protocols assist in real-time custom thresholding, trend analysis, forecasting, time-series performance data analysis, visual plotting, and operational forecasting in real-time.

OpenNMS get more granular data about your network that helps to anticipate potential issues through tracking changes across your network devices and configurations. It is much easier to maintain and use without the annoyance of rapid upgrades and releases.

Features

• Inventory and Fault Management.
• Network Traffic Management.
• Application Perspective Monitoring.
• Border Gateway Protocol monitoring support for advanced monitoring and management of routing devices.
• Alarm and Event Management.
• Real-time notifications for a high-priority response.
• Customizable Grafana dashboards.
• Enterprising network visualization in terms of resource graphs, database reports, charts, etc.

If you want to focus on your core activities rather than time-consuming monitoring and maintenance, OpenNMS will help you with everything from data collection to assessment to actionable insights and visualizations.

It is a complete solution to monitor business network performance and ensure the performance and availability of your vital network services. 

Icinga

Icinga can monitor vast, complex ecosystems across numerous sites since it is scalable and flexible. Icinga is a network resource availability monitoring system that also alerts users to disruptions and gathers performance statistics for reporting.

The largest companies in the world, like Adobe, Audi, Vodafone, puppet, and others, trust Icinga.

The monitoring component of the Icinga stack is merely one. Other benefits of the solution include timely notifications, insightful visualizations and analytics, task automation, and easy integration with other systems.

All varieties of cloud infrastructure are monitored by its scalable monitoring system. Because of its connection with existing tools, like Graphite, Ansible, InfluxDB, Grafana, AWS, Jira, Azure, ServiceNow, and many others, you may design monitoring solutions tailored to your particular requirements.

The platform may easily grow from a small infrastructure to big multitenant networks.

Features

• Centralized console for infrastructure monitoring.
• Role-based access management, SSL-encrypted connections, and high availability clusters to assure continuous uptime.
• Automation of recurring tasks.
• Comprehensive reports based on metrics, logs, patterns, and notifications based on thresholds.

Icinga is an enterprise-ready solution for keeping an eye on a variety of board spectrums, including devices, databases, apps, cloud services, websites, and networks.

Netdata

Netdata is open-source and the most advanced software for monitoring, tracking, and troubleshooting on-premise and cloud infrastructure. It provides real-time metrics, insightful charts, and

intelligent alarms to rapidly identify issues and take proactive steps before it becomes a major breakdown.

All physical and virtual servers, containers, cloud infrastructure, and any other infrastructure components are monitored by it. By gathering and studying metrics and logs, administrators may quickly troubleshoot and resolve problems. 

Because of its user-friendly and straightforward interface, administrators and developers can easily get crucial insights into the operation of their infrastructure, visualize complex data, and spot problems before they get out of hand.

It offers a broad range of features irrespective of the type of your infrastructure to monitor every physical and virtual server, container, and IoT device. Its architecture is ML-powered, which helps to detect irregularities quickly and trigger an alert. 

Features

• Infinite scalability from bare metal servers to cloud deployments covering a range of services and devices.
• Real-time hundreds of interactive charts that update every second.
• Distributed architecture, with privacy by design.
• Zero configuration Kubernetes monitoring.
• Machine Learning assisted Anomaly Detection, Alerts, and Metric Correlations.

Open source software, Netdata, is one of the most starred projects on the CNCF landscape. It is quite flexible for integrating various popular tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, Graphite, OpenTSDB, InfluxDB, or even third-party commercial solutions.

M/Monit

Modern, small, and scalable M/Monit is software made specifically for managing and keeping track of Unix systems. This free and open-source software performs automatic maintenance, repairs, and significant causal actions in error in addition to managing and controlling Unix systems.

Anyone who wishes to have complete control over their Unix systems should use this utility.

The tools provide complete details about resource usage and system state and also provide automatic alerts when issues arise and take corrective as and when required. The admins can easily and quickly monitor the services and devices across the infrastructure with the help of this tool.

Features

• Ability to use desktops, tablets, and phones to access the interface.
• Real-time charts and trend predictions.
• Support is provided for TCP, UDP, and Unix domain sockets.
• Rule-based alert mechanism.
• Built-in database support for SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Its popularity is attributed to effective architecture and event-specific functions, including restarting servers, debugging, and sending emails. To produce informative graphs, it automatically collects crucial data from the host.

Based on the demands of the company, this tool can also be modified to meet particular monitoring requirements.

LibreNMS

LibreNMS is a trustworthy open-source platform for closely monitoring network performance and health. With its numerous features and support of SNMP, Syslog, and other protocols, it monitors and controls various devices, services, platforms, and operating systems.

The platform supports systems like Cisco, Juniper, Linux, Windows, and more. Because of its highly scalable architecture, it is simple to customize to fulfill the specific monitoring requirements of various organizations of all sizes.

Features

• Customizable alerts and notifications can be tailored to an organization’s specific needs.
• Multiple protocols data collection (STP, OSPF, BGP, etc.).
• VLAN, ARP, and FDB table collection.
• Device Backup integration (Oxidized, RANCID).
• Distributed Polling.

The tool can suffice the need for network monitoring and provides insights into network traffic, device health, and bandwidth utilization. LibreNMS helps to keep the network running smoothly for all organizations of all sizes.

Graphite

An appropriate infrastructure monitoring solution for local networks and Cloud infrastructure for SMBs and large corporations is Graphite. It is employed to monitor the efficiency of websites, applications, commercial services, and networked servers.

The software is suited for the changing data sets of today because it makes it simple to save, retrieve, exchange, and visualize time-series data.

Its main use is to manage numerical time-series data points or a number of performance indicators, such as CPU, I/O metrics, RAID array, SSDs, etc., from tens of thousands of servers and depicted in graphs.

Graphite architecture saves numeric time-series data in its specialized database and is used to visualize it in the form of real-time charts and graphs through its web interfaces.

Chris Davis created it at Orbitz at the beginning of 2006, and it eventually gained popularity. Graphite is distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

Top industry players like Booking.com, Github, Salesforce, Etsy, Reddit, etc., employ Graphite monitoring tools to keep an eye on their production, e-commerce, services, etc.

It is also achievable to combine the platform with other third-party tools like Nagios, Windows server, logstash, etc.

Observium

Observium is a robust network monitoring and management software to give your company’s infrastructure unmatched visibility.

For companies of all sizes looking for a reliable, user-friendly monitoring solution, Observium is an excellent option because of its wide variety of supported devices and complete set of capabilities. 

Governments, major corporations, telecommunications companies, ISPs, and SMB businesses have joined Observium’s user base. Notable clients include Twitch, eBay, PayPal, Aramco, Squarespace, The Scottish Government, Yahoo Inc., Spotify, and others.

Observium technology simplifies network management, collects performance metrics, and generates warnings when issues are found. It automatically detects network devices and services, and tens of thousands of installations are done to monitor millions of devices.

You can configure thresholds and failure states for a variety of different entity kinds using its threshold alerting system.

Features

• Provides proactive information to handle potential issues before they create breakdowns or outages.
• Helps in disaster recovery planning.
• Tracking and billing consumer bandwidth usage are made simpler with traffic accounting.
• Applications from third parties are supported, including Apache, BIND, DRBD, Memcached, MySQL, NFS, and others.

Due to Observium’s user-friendly web interface, the platform can be readily controlled by both technical and non-technical people to understand the health and state of the network.

It is compatible with a broad range of hardware, software, and operating systems, including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp, and many others.

Enterprise, Professional, and Community Editions are the three editions of the program that are offered. The community edition is cost-free.

Final words

Tracking, Monitoring, and management of Infrastructure with the touch of automation have become a necessity of today’s world technology. Open-source monitoring software is free; some software even has advanced features in their premium versions.

Most of the software discussed above is comprehensive and supports SMBs to large organizations. Suggesting any particular software for all is difficult because every organization has varied interests.

So it is recommended to try this monitoring software and, based on your suitability, you can finalize the best one for your Infrastructure.

You may also be interested in our introduction to Prometheus and Grafana.