Network-monitoring software 2024
Take the pain out of firefighting networking issues with software dedicated to the task. Dave Mitchell explains what to look for and reviews four contenders
Healthy business networks are productive ones, and it’s imperative that IT departments keep them that way. Downtime is a dirty word: it can cause a loss of productivity, while prolonged service outages may lead to irreparable damage to a company’s reputation and customer perception.
As networks become interconnected and ever more complex, support staff need all the help they can get if they want to avoid a daily firefight. Network-monitoring software is ideal as it can tell them precisely what’s on their networks, how it’s performing and alert them to any issues as soon as they happen.
The good news for IT departments is that there are plenty of products available all capable of providing a wealth of information about network, device and application health. This month, we review four affordable monitoring solutions – namely ManageEngine, Mutiny, Paessler and Progress Software – and test them in our lab to help you make the right choice.
■ Health and safety
To allow the monitoring software to gather detailed device health information, some preparatory work is required that won’t affect general operations. Infrastructure devices such as switches and routers require the SNMP (simple network management protocol) service manually enabled, as for security reasons, this is usually disabled by default.
If possible, use the secure SNMPv3 as its traffic is encrypted and it requires the monitoring software to authenticate with a device. Many networks will have legacy devices that only support the less secure SNMPv1/v2, but you can tighten it up: instead of using the well-known “public” read-only community name, pick one that isn’t easy to guess, and don’t provide a write community name as this isn’t required.
The Windows management instrumentation (WMI) service is Microsoft’s standard method for monitoring Windows servers and workstations, and you’ll need to provide your monitoring software with valid user account credentials. WMI is enabled by default and provides far more system information than SNMP, such as running services, processes, Hyper-V operations and even the status of Windows Updates.
If required, you can use SNMP on Windows Servers, which is installed from the Server Manager app. Note that Windows only supports SNMP v2 so you should use the security tab in the SNMP service properties page to set a non-guessable read community name and configure it to only accept queries from the monitoring host.
Mode confusion
Licensing is the most confusing area of network monitoring, as each product is licensed by the number of monitored elements, sensors or devices. To make matters worse, each vendor uses a different method with each claiming theirs is the most affordable.
Elements and sensors are the same thing and relate to a single monitored item, which could be a CPU core, a Windows service, a disk volume or one port on an Ethernet switch.
Device licences can initially seem more expensive but they allow you to monitor anything and everything on a single device regardless of the number of components it has.
Device licences are a good choice if you want to monitor all device functions. They’re well suited to networks with lots of port-dense switches, but can get expensive if you only want to keep an eye on one or two items. Sensor licences are more flexible as you can decide precisely what you want to monitor, but they can get used up very quickly so choose products that let you remove unwanted sensors and reassign them elsewhere.
Monitoring apps
The best products can do much more than hardware monitoring, with many capable of keeping a watchful eye on business apps such as Exchange and SQL Server as well as cloud services such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft 365. There may be hidden costs, though, as some products provide these facilities as optional chargeable features or add-on packages.
Virtual environment monitoring may incur extra costs, too. Although all products provide basic host availability checks as standard, you may require add-on components to bring up details of host resource usage and virtual machine (VM) statuses. There’s a strong argument in favour of sensor-based products as they include these features as standard.
It’s useful to be able to monitor the network from your mobile device.
Most vendors offer free Android and iOS apps that connect to the monitoring host, with one product in this guide standing out with the best features.
Metric systems
Monitoring software is capable of gathering a huge amount of information about devices, and their discovery processes will probably surprise you by revealing more of them on your network than you previously thought. Initially, it may seem great to have an eye in the sky looking at everything, but tracking all available metrics can present a smokescreen of information, making it difficult to spot important insights.
The best products offer multiple dashboards that allow you to create custom views focusing on key performance indicators. Network operations centre (NOC) views are another feature to look for as you can use these to present your support department with a big heads-up display showing network pain points that require their immediate attention.
Alerting is also important, as you won’t always be in front of your monitoring console. Facilities to issue alarms when problems are detected are essential and can range from sending an email, generating an SMS or running a program, with the best products integrating with platforms such as ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams.
Monitoring software uses thresholds for metrics such as critical percentages on CPU utilisation and memory usage or excessive network bandwidth use. These are linked to alerts, with most products creating a default set of thresholds based on what they discover on each device so all you have to do is create an action to link them with your preferred alerting methods.
No two monitoring solutions are the same and, with this in mind, we’ve made sure the four products on review are available as free timelimited evaluations with all features enabled. Read on to see which one will keep your business network running like a well-oiled machine.