Monitoring network infrastructure for vulnerabilities is known as infrastructure monitoring. Infrastructure monitoring tools monitor the performance, availability, and general health of networked equipment. The user will get a notification if the system identifies any issue. The user can then create a report with the help of the infrastructure monitoring tool to dig deeper into the issue's root causes.
Global Market for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
According to GlobeNewswire, the global IT infrastructure monitoring market was previously anticipated to be worth US$25.4 billion in 2022 but is now expected to increase to US$36.1 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 4.5% from 2022 to 2030.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Advantages
- An effective infrastructure monitoring system enables the following:
- Project performance improvement
- Improving the user experience
- The ability to manage data from a variety of sources during both planned and unforeseen traffic overloads.
- Monitoring of failures, poor resource management, and performance decline patterns over time and reporting
- Determining the root cause using the data gathered
- Proactive monitoring, which aids in avoiding problems before they arise.
5 Best Monitoring Tools for Infrastructure
Let's look at the top IT infrastructure monitoring tools available. When compiling this list, we've considered several functionalities, user-friendliness, sophisticated capabilities, scalability, and overall design.
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is the industry standard for IT infrastructure monitoring. It is the best IT infrastructure monitoring tool of today's most comprehensive and sophisticated tools available today. Over 1,200 applications and systems are supported, including Active Directory, Azure, AWS Cloud, Microsoft, and Apache HTTP Server. Custom app monitoring, application dependency mapping, Azure monitoring, server capacity planning, and application monitoring are among the tool's many noteworthy features.
With SAM's application performance monitoring capabilities, you can perform in-depth diagnostics that give you point-in-time visibility into complicated issues. It can automate application administration, discovery, monitoring, and performance reporting, saving you time and money while also warning you when baseline deviations occur. You can also monitor simulated transactions to guarantee that the end user of your website or application receives the greatest speed possible. Additionally, it enables you to monitor real and virtual server resource use and capacity data, enabling you to predict requirements and effectively manage workloads.
Plus Points
- Cross-stack monitoring data correlation and ongoing server monitoring
- Forecasts and capacity charts that assist with long-term capacity planning
- Tracks overall application and server performance, uptime, and hardware concerns
- Tracks performance indicators for Docker containers, such as CPU, memory, and uptime
- Data visualization with simple dashboards
Negative Points
- It can overlap with other SolarWinds tools
- Complicated configuration brought on by several components
Pricing
SAM provides a free 30-day trial. There are alternatives for perpetual licensing and subscriptions: Prices for up to 10 nodes start at $1,622 and $2,995, respectively.
- Dynatrace Infrastructure Monitoring Tool
Full-stack monitoring is available on a single platform from Dynatrace. It provides unique perspectives on your infrastructure. For any infrastructure, advanced observability is scalable and autonomous. Dynatrace gathers data from the cloud, hybrid environments, containers, VMs, networks, servers, storage, and many more sources.
You have access to process detection and resource consumption, network usage and performance monitoring, and log analysis thanks to improved observability across PaaS and container platforms like AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, or Cloud Foundry. Alternatively, you may integrate third-party data and event monitoring to keep your partners responsible and confirm their SLAs. You can choose Dynatrace as an infrastructure or a full-stack monitoring solution.
Plus Points
- Dashboards can be customized for rapid and precise data visualization
- Flexible architecture for monitoring with OneAgent SDK
- Monitoring integrations for Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Docker
- Automated dependency mapping and discovery
- Simple agent administration using the UI of the tool
Negative Points
- A steep learning curve because of the intricacy of the tool
- Relatively high price
Pricing
The Full-stack monitoring plan costs $69 per month, and monitoring of the infrastructure costs $21 per month for 8GB per Host.
- ManageEngine OpManager
This is also one of the top infrastructure monitoring tools. Using the program OpManager Plus, you can monitor every aspect of your network infrastructure in real time. The program gives you complete visibility into your whole network architecture. Consequently, IT staff can rely on this application to find problems affecting your company's servers, routers, and other networked devices. The program does a great job of assisting you in eliminating performance bottlenecks. OpManager Plus enables you to monitor the efficiency of both on-premises and cloud-based apps. You can track more than 100 real and virtual servers with its assistance. Plus, the program excels in auditing and reviewing firewall policies.
Plus Points
- A detailed analysis of network parameters, including latency, packet loss, errors, and speed
- SNMP/WMI/CLI process and system health monitoring
- WMI-based monitoring for Hyper-V and Agentless monitoring for VMware
- 40+ metrics for Hyper-V and more than 70 built-in metrics for VMware
- Monitoring and notification of faults
Negative Points
- Network monitoring-specific, with little support for other infrastructure elements
- No version hosted
Pricing
A free version works on three devices with a 30-day trial. There are three paid versions available that differ in terms of functionality:
- Standard ($245 for 10 devices)
- Professional ($345 for 10 devices)
- Enterprise ($11,545 for 250 devices)
- Elastic Stack
The ELK stack, often known as elastic, combines three open-source software. When used together, these technologies provide a powerful understanding of your infrastructure.
- Elasticsearch, sometimes called E, searches and filters various data types.
- L stands for the log management and analysis tool Logstash.
- K represents the data visualization tool Kibana.
Using Fleek, the Unified Elastic Agent with centralised administration, you can gather and manage logs from infrastructure sources, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Kafka, Kafka, and Nginx. By enhancing log entries with metadata for quicker root cause discovery, you can also dismantle infrastructure and application silos.
Although the ELK is free, you still need to pay for the equipment, storage, and network required to run it, which may grow quite expensive. While it's unquestionably a good thing that the ELK stack is a Swiss army knife for infrastructure monitoring, its deployment and setup may be quite difficult.
Plus Points
- Possibility to utilize a hosted solution or host ELK on-premises
- The Kibana dashboard's ability to display CPU/memory utilization and process-level information
- Real-time personalization, inspection, and data visualization to provide in-depth information
- Performs real-time analysis of telemetry data from dispersed infrastructures.
- Resources for several programming and scripting languages
Negative Points
- Multi-step deployment that is intricate
- A complex infrastructure setup is required to guarantee data usability, high availability, and resilience.
Pricing
ELK is an open-source solution and is free to download and use. Although it can be pricey, you do have to pay for the infrastructure (i.e., computation), storage, and network bandwidth needed to run the ELK components.
- Nagios
Network monitoring software for CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian is called Nagios XI. It is one of the famous web-based infrastructure monitoring tools that offers configuration wizards that walk you through monitoring various network segments to expedite the setup process. You can use a range of dials, graphs, and charts to visualize the performance of your network on the dashboard, which is fully customisable.
One of the things that makes Nagios XI the best infrastructure monitoring tool is its extensible design. Third-party apps can be integrated via the platform APIs to improve the program's fundamental functionality. You may utilize a variety of APIs on the Nagios exchange site to add new functionality. For instance, to observe even more performance data, use the Webmetrics API plugin for Nagios.
Plus Points
- Plugin-based extensible architecture
- Continuous infrastructure monitoring with highly accessible deployment
- Web-based single-pane visibility of IT infrastructure state
- Event handlers' automated remedial capabilities
- Access to the source code of open-source software
Negative Points
- Certain features are hidden in the free, open-source version.
- Multiple add-ons are required for the complete set of capabilities.
Pricing
Nagios Core is available without charge. Nagios XI is available in two different configurations:
- Standard ($1,995 per 100 nodes)
- Enterprise ($3,495).
How to Pick the Right Monitoring Solution for Infrastructure?
With the aid of infrastructure monitoring tools, it is feasible to maintain infrastructure monitoring for a medium-sized to big network. The unique needs of your business will determine the IT infrastructure monitoring program you select. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is your best option if you'd benefit from an IT monitoring solution focusing on servers and apps but only need a breadth of features like this.
SolarWinds Server Performance & Configuration Bundle can be a better option to monitor configurations for your business. This program integrates Server & Application Monitor with Server Configuration Monitor to boost the functionality of detecting illegal configuration changes in servers. The decision between SAM and SPCB boils down to how much you require the additional features of SPCB, and SAM may make more sense when meeting your infrastructure monitoring needs if configuration monitoring is not necessary.
