9 Open Source Tools For Network Monitoring and Management

Managing the network could be a headache, especially when you don't have the right tool. There are plenty of network monitoring tools available which lets you identify loopholes and bugs. Many of them are paid and several open source network management tools are also available.

Instead of spending a fortune, it's a viable choice to look for (free) open source tools, as might possible what you are looking for isn't available with premium one. I have identified 12 best network monitoring and management software to ease IT admins jobs.

GroundWork Monitor Core

It is a unified monitoring tool to keep an eye on all your devices and applications be it virtual or physical. You can slice information like – including by time, location, or ce type. The modern API-based monitoring is built for next-generation dynamic infrastructure.

Cacti

The solution is designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. It offers a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box.

Observium

It is an autodiscovery SNMP based network monitoring platform. The tool supports a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Dell, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp and much more.

Zabbix

The open source solution is designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices. It can monitor several things including performance, agents for all platforms, agent-less monitoring, availability and SLA reporting and more.

Open NMS

The software is a carrier-grade, highly integrated, open source platform designed for building network monitoring solutions. Detect service outages and measure latency for graphing and thresholding via synthetic polling. Collect performance metrics from industry standard agents via SNMP, JMX, WMI, NRPE, NSClient++ and XMP simply through configuration.

Nagios

It is a powerful, enterprise-class host, service, application, and network monitoring program. Nagios runs on NIX hosts and can monitor Windows applications, Linux applications, UNIX applications, and Web applications.

Ganglia

The scalable distributed monitoring system is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization.

Angry IP Scanner

Angry IP scanner is fast and friendly network scanner for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is very extensible, allowing it to be used for a very wide range of purposes, with the primary goal of being useful to network administrators.

NetworkMiner packet analyzer

The tool is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows that can detect the OS, hostname and open ports of network hosts through packet sniffing or by parsing a PCAP file. It can also extract transmitted files from network traffic.