Your web and mobile applications are expected to run flawlessly round the clock. To make sure they run as expected you need server monitoring tools to watch your servers and applications. Also, you need people and process in place to address alerts from these tools any time of the day or week.

Open source tools are sometimes too basic to monitor a system on which a business relies. 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. Of course, that team would have to have one or more members willing to manage and maintain the monitoring system they build.

Before spending a significant portion of your IT budget on application and server monitoring tools, consider these free tools for monitoring your IT needs and environment

 

1) SERVER & APPLICATION MONITOR

Unlike the mediocre server monitoring tools, Server & application monitor tool offers capacity planning, advanced baselines, reports, user permissions, asset inventory, etc. Along with Linux, IIS, Windows, Java, Active Directory, Exchange, etc., SAM provides deep application monitoring and multi-vendor server hardware for 200+ applications. Although this may not be a free tool, it’s quite cost-efficient when compared to an open source or free tool and you can take advantage of the 30days free trial.

2) NAGIOS CORE

A cost-effective, customizable and widely used open source tool for monitoring network performance and server are NAGIOS CORE. IT pros are yielding benefits of getting support from its user community. As opposed to Nagios XI which has added features, the tool only provides limited monitoring capabilities. The main challenge with this tool is completing the initial setup phase and is sophisticated to install, setup, and configure. The tool offers metrics to monitor server performance, remediate services, and reporting. It could be the apt solution for you if you’re comfortable setting up self-customized dashboards or have time to invest to master the tool.

3) MONITOR.US

One among the very few tools that provide capabilities to monitor services for Windows and Linux is Monitor.us. Being a cloud-based free server monitoring provided by Team Viewer, it provides you with an overview of the health and availability of your workstations and servers, including bandwidth, CPU and memory disk. And since it’s hosted in the cloud you needn’t install, configure, maintain, or make updates and get to monitor networks and databases by building custom dashboards along with server monitoring.

 

4) SolarWinds Server Health Monitor

 

A free monitoring tool that enables you to monitor the hardware health metrics and status of PowerEdge™, IBM® eServer xSeries servers, Dell® and VMware® ESX/ESXi hypervisor. This tool from SolarWinds monitors status, health, and server hardware availability in no time. Along with the status and performance of crucial server hardware components fan speed, temperature, power supply, CPU, battery, etc one can rapidly identify application performance and server hardware issues impacting server with the aid of Server Health Monitor.

5) GANGLIA

Ganglia is a solid monitoring platform that supports many operating systems and processors. Exclusively designed for high-performance computing systems, such as clusters and grids, it’s an open source (BSD license) which has scalable and distributed architecture based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. Leveraging commonly used technologies like XDR for data transport and XML for data representation, its primary aim is to engineer algorithms and data structures for maximum efficiency, resulting in overheads for each node. This is commonly used by educational institutions of massive size.

6) COLLECTD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written in C++, there are several plug-ins for various systems which permits the user to collect data outside the necessary system metrics such as memory and CPU. Available for multiple operating systems, CollectD is a renowned open source tool that accumulates basic system performance statistics for a period and stores it in various format like RRD files that are used to graph the data. CollectD is generally used to detect performance bottlenecks, create alerts and monitor and predict system load over time. Utilized for DevOps projects as it is benchmarked as a standard open source collection agent, CollectD is integrated with various graphing tools such as Cacti, Grafana, and Graphite.

7) CACTI

 

Cacti can handle data collection and all kinds of graphs that can be displayed and organized in various ways and works with user permissions and provides access to specific charts or graphs to certain users. Cacti uses an external script to gather data in a corn job via an external script that feeds metrics with which Cacti stores in a MySQL® database.

8) ZABBIX

An enterprise-level software that’s used by thousands of companies worldwide including DELL, Orange, Salesforce, ICANN, etc. designed for monitoring the availability of servers, its performance and network equipment to web applications and database.

Being Configurable from its web front end, it’s simpler to use ZABBIX when compared to the popular Nagois that requires several text files for its configuration.

• Further, ZABBIX combines both monitoring and trending functionality, When Nagios focuses exclusively on monitoring, this tool does both monitoring and trending functionalities.
• Users can monitor performance and availability of web-based services, the web monitoring function moreover allows Zabbix to log into web application consistently and run through a series of typical steps being performed by a customer.

Pros: An open-source with well-designed Web GUI. It offers dedicated agents, good alerts, and an active user community.

Cons: It has the limitation of not being able to cater to large networks with 1000+ NODES, due to web GUI limitations, complicated templates, PHP performance and a lack of real-time tests

9) OpenNMS

The open source server monitoring platform OpenNMS that can be installed in a docker enables the user to collect metrics using JMX, WMI, SNMP, NRPE, XML HTTP, JDBC, XML, JSON, etc. Along with identifying layer two network topologies in your network and scans the network for nodes, interfaces and services you’ve have searched. One can find a node for each address that responded to the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) pings sent by discovery. It can support Grafana and is built on event-driven architecture.

Features:

• Designed especially for Linux, but Windows, Solaris, and OSX are also supported
• Device Temperature monitoring
• Customizable admin dashboard
• Power Supply Monitoring
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Events can generate notifications via email, SMS, XMPP and various other methods
• Geographical node map to show nodes and service outages using Open Street Map, Google Maps or MapQuest.

10) Icinga

Incinga, which originated from Nagios Fork in 2009, broke free from the constraints of a fork and designed Incinga 2 which is easily configurable, faster and easier to scale. Its monitoring framework permits monitoring of all the existing systems in the network and provides alerts you and provides a database for your SLA reporting.

Features:

• Monitoring of network services, server components, and host services
• Parallelized service checks
• It performs monitoring with Icinga 2 plugins
• Support for event handlers and provides notifications
• Phone, SMS, call and email support
• Cross-platform support for various operating systems
• Optional, 2 user interfaces to choose from, Classic UI and Icinga web
• Template-based reports

11) Sciencelogic EM-7

With lower “Total Cost of Ownership”, Sciencelogic EM-7 provides uninterrupted support for the complete system by a single vendor. It provides optimized operations (pre-loaded and built as a comprehensive integrated solution) and can be easily deployed. With no costly integration projects, the scalable solution architecture provides a cost-effective solution to start small and grow rapidly. EM7’s single data store is fully integrated, performance-tuned and self-managed with an automated backup strategy that is efficient. Sciencelogic EM-7 delivers superior security architecture through the hardened operating system and built-in dynamic firewall and has no modules and has all its functionality included in the base product offering. Additional enhancements are made to one coherent system and not to multiple systems with different requirements.

Pros:

• Cost: EM7 starts at $25,000 for a single all-in-one box that can manage a few hundred devices, while CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM offerings are at least 10 times more expensive
• Quicker installation

• Robust GUI offers device pop-up menus and is easy to navigate.

Cons:

• Doesn’t support Windows WMI;
• Can’t collect network-flow information, as sFlow or Cisco Systems’ Netflow do.
• EM7 neither provides an overall topology map nor can it correlate network and systems outages.

12) GFI Network Server Monitor

GFI Network Server Monitor monitors servers and network for software and hardware failures. It’s quite simple to use, learn and deploy and automatically alerts and corrects network and server issues. It monitors web servers, Exchange, ISA, and SQL.

Pros:

• Easy to setup (Expect to be up and live within an hr)
• Automatically alerts and corrects network and server issues;
• Offers a good library of built-in checks that you can instantly tap into;
• Simple, intuitive configuration interface;
• Mature product

Cons:

• Fluctuating Prices: Cost of the product varies with the number of IP addresses monitored.
• The web interface is limited by current standards.

 

13) Anturis – Cloud-based Monitoring Service for Servers and Web sites, IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Built for external monitoring of company web services and internal monitoring of IT infrastructure, such as servers and applications, Anturis is a cloud-based (SaaS) monitoring platform. Backed by experienced IT experts and software engineers from leading global IT companies and startups including Parallels, Kaspersky Lab, Amdocs, Atempo, K7 Cloud, and jNetX, it costs $9.50 monthly and renders free plan for a limited period.

 

14) CopperEgg – IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Server Monitoring and Website Monitoring for cloud infrastructure by CopperEgg. CopperEgg provides simple, unified, smart, and fast insight into your AWS cloud servers (EC2), websites, web applications, and services to optimize performance and troubleshoot issues in a single pane of glass. The CopperEgg unified dashboard updates every few seconds (not minutes) and reveals details that help uncover previously hidden information, like CPU Steal, and resolve problems before they arise.

CopperEgg caters to Server Monitoring and Website Monitoring for cloud infrastructure with unified dashboards periodically (every few seconds) and discloses reveals information that helps uncover previously hidden information, like CPU Steal, and proactively resolve problems.

 

15) Instrumental – Free developer accounts for application & server monitoring

The query language allows the user to transform, aggregate and time-shift data in real-time. It renders real-time visualizations, automatic data collection and provides intelligent alerts across your application and servers. Over a million data points are processed every second and can, therefore, handle data in large scale. All signups include a free developer account for up to 500 metrics so you can get fully set up without burning a hole in your pocket. Cost is pretty much pocket-friendly, it’s Free for up to 500 metrics, then $0.10/month per metric.

16) LogicMonitor – Hosted monitoring of networks, servers, applications, storage & cloud

 

Along with pre-configured out-of-the-box monitoring for most vendors of switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, servers, applications, databases, VoIP systems, and storage from a single web-based console, LogicMonitor renders performance monitoring, historical trending, reporting, and email/SMS alerting to proactively warn IT staff of potential issues before they cause business interruptions. The user can opt free 14-day trial or $249 per month for SaaS-based data centers monitoring of physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures.

17) Pingdom Server Monitor (previously Scoutapp – Hosted Server Monitoring)

 

Pingdom Server Monitor offers 30-day free trial or $10 per server monthly options for its users making it an affordable option. It provides flexible charts and alerts and deploys in five minutes or less, 60+ monitoring plugins, and no ugly configuration syntax to memorize (do it all via our web UI).

18) WhatsUpGold – Network & Server Monitoring Software

 

With WhatsUpGold, you can figure out how your IT environment is performing with the server and network monitoring. One can opt for a free 30-day trial then be charged $1,595 to use active, passive, and performance monitoring techniques to monitor the performance, availability, and status of your network, servers, and applications.

19) BMC TrueSighe Plus (Formerly Boundary) – Server & Application Monitoring for DevOps

 

It’s a Server & Application Monitoring for DevOps which is Application-Aware Infrastructure Performance Monitoring. Costing Free 14-day trial, then from $12.25 per month, it requires no change to the application and is agnostic across languages and infrastructures, collects massive amounts of performance data, sits on every VM, amalgamates data from other sources and puts it all in context with its real-time, unique application map.

 

20) op5 – Open Source Network Monitoring & Server Monitoring

Op5 Monitor sells downloadable software that monitor, visualize and troubleshoot IT environments and collect information both from hardware, software, virtual and/or cloud-based services. Being a software product for a server, Network monitoring and management based on the open source Project Nagios, is further developed and supported by op5 AB and displays the status, health, and performance of the IT network being monitored and has an integrated log server, op5 Logger.

21) PA Server Monitor – Server monitoring and network monitoring.

Available to users at $49 or a free trial, the primary function of the software is to monitor the Data that’s kept on customers servers and not stored in the cloud. Developed by Power Admin LLC, PA Server Monitor is a server monitoring and network monitoring software application. It’s an agentless monitoring software to watch ping, CPU, memory, disk, SNMP traps, events, with available historical reports with apps available for iOS and Android.

22) Sealion – Server monitoring

SeaLion is a cloud-based system monitoring tool for Linux servers that collect data consistently from servers which will be available on Sealion workspace and be availed at 8$ per month or the users can opt for a free trial. On executing a command, it gets started and installs an agent at /usr/local/sealion-agent and runs as an unprivileged user (sealion).

23) Server Density – Server monitoring

Server Density saves time and effort with simple, reliable server monitoring. It provides bulletproof monitoring out of the box with endless ways to customize. FreeBSD, Windows, OS X and Linux server monitoring with custom plugins are available at free trial or $10 per month.

24) Eventsentry – SIEM, Event Log Management & Windows Server Monitoring

The EventSentry Web Reports offer a powerful, yet easy to use the web interface to review changes on your network. EventSentry ensures that you are notified about the issues before they lead to costly downtime by monitoring each Windows server in real time.

25) Zenoss

Server Monitoring Capabilities of Zenoss include Dynamic, centralized network and IP address inventory for discovered devices, Integration and monitoring of SNMP traps with other IT infrastructure event streams. It enables discovery of blade enclosures and their management consoles as well as the enclosed components and mapping of slots to blade servers. It permits monitoring of memory, throughput, disk utilization, power consumption and processor speeds. Along with performance charts, synthetic transactions and availability metrics, it provides file system and process monitoring. Some of the features are given below:

• Network interface and route monitoring
• Central processing unit (CPU) utilization information
• Hardware information, including memory, number of CPUs and model numbers
• Operating system (OS) information
• Software package information, e.g., installed software

 

Parting Thoughts

There are so several popular, widely used systems and server monitoring tools. Before blindly choosing one tool, identify what kind of infrastructure you want to monitor, how much of the stack you want to monitor, and how much time and resources you should invest in building, integrating, and customizing a free monitoring tool versus investing in a commercial product.

Get in touch with SupportPRO today to find the ideal tool that suits your server infrastructure and to respond if something happens round the clock. Our experienced server experts will proactively fix your server issues before it becomes a problem impacting your infrastructure.

If you require help, contact SupportPRO Server Admin