Waking up to a cold morning with alerts beeping on your mobile and prompts showing servers on your network are down. You are rushing to the office to fix them, and you see frustrated employees and a pissed boss. Well, welcome to IT management, this has been almost the routine for most of the IT departments across the world, especially in the last two years.
Network Management is a continuous process and IT managers will require multiple factors to be normal to keep things functioning. And to achieve that, they need talent, tools, funding and infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll see the top 6 network management software for 2024 that will facilitate keeping your network intact and up all the time. We have tested the tools, and giving our verdict and ranking based on features, efficiency, support, capabilities, community response and affordability. It’s a cumulative ranking, and hope these top 6 network management software lists will make your evaluation cycle less complicated and short.
Network Management Software is a tool used by IT departments to ensure their network components like Switches, Routers, Servers, Firewalls, Endpoints and other touchpoints are working as usual with the right security and efficiency. The network management software will also come in handy for remote and hybrid work culture.
There are two types of network management software, Agent and Agentless Platform. The agentless version will be installed on the premises and can help you identify and monitor all the devices in your network without any program being installed on those devices. The Only disadvantage is that you will need a dedicated system with high horsepower to process the software and the database associated with it.
While its counterpart, the agent-based network monitoring software will be a SaaS model. Hence, the infrastructure will be taken care of by the provider but you need to install the agent across the devices that you want to manage. However, these agents need to be regularly updated to suit the OS changes and that will be the only major challenge with an agent-based system.
The top 6 network management software that we will be addressing in this article are from the same domain but they come with their pros and cons, which have to be understood by the evaluators before choosing one for their organization.
All the below-mentioned tools are tested, studied and analyzed before deciding on their ranking. So this is a vendor-neutral story, and you can take our word for it.
LogicMonitor takes the fifth spot on our list of network management software. It comes with health and performance monitoring under one platform. It is an agentless model with a cloud-based collector. It provides a good visualization of the entire network with a holistic dashboard and network topology mapping. It comes with auto-discovery of network devices and troubleshooting of those devices.
It also supports the following,
LogicMonitor comes with a 14-day free trial and two different packages, Pro for less than 199 devices and Enterprise for 200+ devices.
Nagios will take fourth place on our list of top 6 network management software. This software provides complete network monitoring capabilities that handle overloads, crashes, server downtime, network connections and other network-related challenges. Manages uptime and response time of servers and other network devices.
Nagios is again an agentless network monitoring software that sends notifications when a component goes haywire and increases the availability of servers and applications.
Nagios offers two solutions,
ManageEngine Site24x7 stands as an all-encompassing solution with a myriad of advanced features, ensuring robust network management and optimization. The platform excels in website monitoring, allowing users to assess the performance of internet services such as HTTPS, DNS server, FTP server, SSL/TLS certificate, SMTP server, and more from 120+ global locations or private networks.
In server monitoring, Site24x7 enables timely outage alerts and root cause analysis, supporting various operating systems like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware, Nutanix, Docker, and Kubernetes. Synthetic web transaction monitoring facilitates the recording and simulation of multi-step user interactions, optimizing applications like login forms and shopping carts.
Application performance monitoring identifies error-generating components for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and mobile platforms. Comprehensive network monitoring covers critical devices like routers, switches, and firewalls, offering deep visibility for managing complex networks. The platform extends its prowess to public and private cloud monitoring, real user monitoring, cloud cost management, public status pages, RMM for MSPs and CSPs, log management from the cloud, and IT monitoring powered by AIOps. With Site24x7, organizations can elevate their IT infrastructure management with a secure, scalable, and feature-rich suite.
Pricing: Starts at $35/month paid annually for the PRO version and $89/month for the Classic Version.
Spiceworks takes the third spot in our list of top 6 network management software. It facilitates the real-time up/down status and alerts for critical web applications and services. It helps with the discovery, monitoring and managing of cloud service on your network. Furthermore, it also provides audits and offers special perks for MSPs that would allow them to scan their clients’ network and fix the issues proactively.
Spiceworks network monitoring offers,
Spiceworks takes the third spot only because all the above-mentioned capabilities are offered for free and that is reliable to a certain limit. IT teams that may not have a budget for a robust network management tool can take a look at the Spiceworks Network Management tool.
The Progress WhatsUp Gold is a network and log monitoring/management software that is taking the place in our list of top 6 network management software. It comes with robust network monitoring features that will make your entire network monitoring routine simple and easy.
It offers monitoring and management of the following,
It also solutions for AWS, Azure, SQL, DevOps and Dark Web monitoring. The pricing is split among the premium and total plus editions, with a premium annual subscription and premium perpetual.
Also, there are two separate bundles based on the roles: Networkwork Admin Bundle and the Systems Admin Bundle. It is a device-based licensing model.
PRTG Network Monitoring Software takes the top position in our list of top 6 network management software. It comes with strong, powerful and easy to use network management features starting with bandwidth, database, application, cloud, server, LAN, SNMP, Log, Sharepoint, Backup, Citrix, Email Server, Exchange, Hyper-V, IIS, Linux, Syslog, VMware, Windows Server, Operating System, File, XenServer, and Free syslog server monitoring.
PRTG network monitoring software provides,
The PRTG pricing is marked at $3200 for 1000 sensors, $6500 for 2500 sensors and PRTG5000 is at $11,500. PRTG is expensive compared to other alternatives mentioned in this article, but when you need something robust and safe then it’s worth every penny.
Give a try on all these network management software, do the free trial, understand the pros and cons, find your estimate, do the math and choose the one that suits the best of your requirements within the budget allocated.
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