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In information technology, the saying 'you can't manage what you can't measure' rings true. Blind spots in system health lead to reactive troubleshooting and potential outages. System monitoring software bridges this gap, providing real-time visibility into your infrastructure. It empowers proactive management, maximizing uptime, optimizing resource allocation, and enabling informed future planning. In this blog, we’ll explore the different system monitoring tools that are the top choice for businesses.
The need for system monitoring tools arise due to their ability to help in the following aspects:
Above all they help you with peace of mind to gain confidence knowing your systems are running smoothly. And there is a tool deployed 24/7 to take care of your system’s health. System monitoring tools come in various flavors, each focusing on different aspects of your IT infrastructure. Here's a quick breakdown:
Read more: Comparing Uptime, Heartbeat, and Synthetic Monitoring
These tools work together to provide a comprehensive view of your IT health, allowing you to proactively manage and optimize your systems. Now let’s explore the top system monitoring tools within each category.
Some popular choices to consider while looking for top system monitoring tools are:
Prometheus is an open-source systems and incident monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true. It is written in Go and uses a time series database to store its data.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Open source
Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored. It provides a powerful and elegant way to create, explore, and share dashboards and data with your team and the world. Grafana supports multiple data sources, including Prometheus, Graphite, Elasticsearch, and many others.
Pros:
Cons:
While both Prometheus and Grafana have their own drawbacks, their combined strengths create a powerful and versatile monitoring solution.
Pricing: Open source
Datadog isn't your average incident monitoring tool. It's a comprehensive platform designed specifically for cloud-native businesses. It goes beyond basic infrastructure monitoring into observability, providing a holistic view of your entire system's health. The platform's key strength lies in its ability to ingest all relevant data, from metrics and traces to logs, across applications, infrastructure, and even third-party services. This centralized approach allows you to monitor everything in a single platform, saving time and simplifying workflows – a major win for fast-growing companies.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Starts free, goes up to $ 34 per host, per month.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a comprehensive monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility into the performance and health of servers, applications, and networks.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Varies by features, but starts around ~$1,400 per year.
New Relic is a top application performance monitoring (APM) tool that helps businesses monitor and optimize the performance of their applications in real-time. It provides detailed insights into application performance, infrastructure, and user behavior, allowing businesses to identify and resolve issues quickly. New Relic uses a combination of agent-based and cloud-based monitoring to collect data from various sources, including servers, databases, and user devices. It also offers features such as automated root cause analysis, real-time alerts, and custom dashboards to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Depends on application size and features, typically starting in the ~$100/month range.
PRTG Network Monitor is a comprehensive network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your network traffic in real-time. It provides detailed insights into bandwidth usage, network performance, and traffic patterns, helping you to optimize your network infrastructure and troubleshoot issues quickly.
Some key features of PRTG Network Monitor include real-time monitoring of network traffic, customizable dashboards and reports, alerts and notifications for network issues, historical data analysis, and Integration with other incident monitoring tools and services.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Free tier for basic needs, paid plans start around ~$175 per year.
Splunk is a powerful business intelligence and analytics platform designed to extract meaningful insights from log data. It allows organizations to collect, analyze, and visualize log data from a variety of sources, including servers, applications, and network devices. Splunk uses advanced parsing, indexing, and search capabilities to make it easy to find and analyze the information needed to troubleshoot issues, monitor performance, and improve security.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Based on data ingestion volume, reach out to the Splunk team to get an estimate.
With this we hope you are now well-positioned to make an informed decision that aligns with your IT infrastructure. For a simple evaluation consider these three factors like,
Beyond selecting the right incident monitoring tool, maintaining system resiliency is equally important. Squadcast seamlessly integrates with all the leading system monitoring tools to help you maintain a unified approach towards reliability automation with simplified Incident Response workflows.
In information technology, the saying 'you can't manage what you can't measure' rings true. Blind spots in system health lead to reactive troubleshooting and potential outages. System monitoring software bridges this gap, providing real-time visibility into your infrastructure. It empowers proactive management, maximizing uptime, optimizing resource allocation, and enabling informed future planning. In this blog, we’ll explore the different system monitoring tools that are the top choice for businesses.
The need for system monitoring tools arise due to their ability to help in the following aspects:
Above all they help you with peace of mind to gain confidence knowing your systems are running smoothly. And there is a tool deployed 24/7 to take care of your system’s health. System monitoring tools come in various flavors, each focusing on different aspects of your IT infrastructure. Here's a quick breakdown:
Read more: Comparing Uptime, Heartbeat, and Synthetic Monitoring
These tools work together to provide a comprehensive view of your IT health, allowing you to proactively manage and optimize your systems. Now let’s explore the top system monitoring tools within each category.
Some popular choices to consider while looking for top system monitoring tools are:
Prometheus is an open-source systems and incident monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true. It is written in Go and uses a time series database to store its data.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Open source
Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored. It provides a powerful and elegant way to create, explore, and share dashboards and data with your team and the world. Grafana supports multiple data sources, including Prometheus, Graphite, Elasticsearch, and many others.
Pros:
Cons:
While both Prometheus and Grafana have their own drawbacks, their combined strengths create a powerful and versatile monitoring solution.
Pricing: Open source
Datadog isn't your average incident monitoring tool. It's a comprehensive platform designed specifically for cloud-native businesses. It goes beyond basic infrastructure monitoring into observability, providing a holistic view of your entire system's health. The platform's key strength lies in its ability to ingest all relevant data, from metrics and traces to logs, across applications, infrastructure, and even third-party services. This centralized approach allows you to monitor everything in a single platform, saving time and simplifying workflows – a major win for fast-growing companies.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Starts free, goes up to $ 34 per host, per month.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a comprehensive monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility into the performance and health of servers, applications, and networks.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Varies by features, but starts around ~$1,400 per year.
New Relic is a top application performance monitoring (APM) tool that helps businesses monitor and optimize the performance of their applications in real-time. It provides detailed insights into application performance, infrastructure, and user behavior, allowing businesses to identify and resolve issues quickly. New Relic uses a combination of agent-based and cloud-based monitoring to collect data from various sources, including servers, databases, and user devices. It also offers features such as automated root cause analysis, real-time alerts, and custom dashboards to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Depends on application size and features, typically starting in the ~$100/month range.
PRTG Network Monitor is a comprehensive network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your network traffic in real-time. It provides detailed insights into bandwidth usage, network performance, and traffic patterns, helping you to optimize your network infrastructure and troubleshoot issues quickly.
Some key features of PRTG Network Monitor include real-time monitoring of network traffic, customizable dashboards and reports, alerts and notifications for network issues, historical data analysis, and Integration with other incident monitoring tools and services.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Free tier for basic needs, paid plans start around ~$175 per year.
Splunk is a powerful business intelligence and analytics platform designed to extract meaningful insights from log data. It allows organizations to collect, analyze, and visualize log data from a variety of sources, including servers, applications, and network devices. Splunk uses advanced parsing, indexing, and search capabilities to make it easy to find and analyze the information needed to troubleshoot issues, monitor performance, and improve security.
Pros:
Cons:
Pricing: Based on data ingestion volume, reach out to the Splunk team to get an estimate.
With this we hope you are now well-positioned to make an informed decision that aligns with your IT infrastructure. For a simple evaluation consider these three factors like,
Beyond selecting the right incident monitoring tool, maintaining system resiliency is equally important. Squadcast seamlessly integrates with all the leading system monitoring tools to help you maintain a unified approach towards reliability automation with simplified Incident Response workflows.