IT Infrastructure solution: Monitoring is important for businesses to ensure that systems are operational. Monitoring various aspects of your IT Infrastructure setup can be a nightmare if not done properly with the right tools.
You cannot ignore monitoring devices, whether you have a small or enterprise-level configuration. Even if you have a personal website, you must monitor its uptime.
There are many software available, from open source to commercial, to help you monitor your infrastructure and alert you to any failures. However, it can be difficult to pick one that fits within your price range with so many options available.
But you can use a powerful open-source monitoring solution. Thanks to the open-source community for keeping them up to date.
Let’s look at the best open source monitoring software for IT infrastructure monitoring to see what works best for you.
Nagios | IT infrastructure solution
Nagios software, founded in 1999, is a market leader in providing monitoring solutions for small to enterprise-level infrastructure.
Nagios can monitor nearly any component, including network protocols, operating systems, system metrics, applications, services, web servers, websites, middleware, etc.
Nagios is powered by the Core 4 monitoring engine, which provides high performance while using fewer server resources.
By using a plugin, you can integrate almost any third-party software, and the plugin has probably already been written.
If you are into middleware, you can use Nagios to monitor WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, Apache, URL, Nginx, and others.
Zabbix | IT infrastructure solution
Zabbix is a fantastic enterprise-level software that monitors everything from server performance and availability to network equipment, web applications, and databases.
Thousands of businesses worldwide use Zabbix, including Salesforce, DELL, ICANN, Orange, etc.
It is a server-agent system architecture where you must install the agent on a server (client) to be monitored by Zabbix. However, for services such as FTP, SSH, HTTP, DNS, etc., you don’t need to install the agent.
You can install Zabbix software on Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.
It supports SNMP and offers better reporting.
Checkmk | IT infrastructure solution
Checkmk is a highly scalable monitoring tool for servers, networks, cloud assets, databases, containers, IoT, and other systems. It comes in two modes.
Raw Edition – entirely open-source and provides free and unlimited monitoring.
Enterprise Edition – As you might expect, it includes additional features.
Prometheus and Grafana | IT infrastructure solution
This list would be unfinished without mentioning two great open-source solutions: Prometheus and Grafana. It’s a DIY solution where you use Prometheus to scrape metrics from servers, operating systems, and applications and use Grafana to visualize them.
Many Prometheus exporters can get metrics from Linux, Windows, databases, routers, messaging systems, storage, APIs, web applications, Kubernetes, etc.
Cacti | IT infrastructure solution
Another open-source network monitoring tool is Cacti, which can be installed on either Linux or Windows OS. It is linked to RRDTool, which allows you to generate graphs based on relevant network data.
It works with SNMP and displays network statistics in easy-to-understand charts.
Cacti require Apache, MySQL, or IIS that support PHP.
OpenNMS | IT infrastructure solution
You can use OpenNMS to build a network monitoring solution for any IT infrastructure. System metrics can be collected using JMX, WMI, SNMP, NRPE, XML HTTP, JDBC, XML, JSON, etc.
With OpenNMS, you can discover layer two network topologies in your network. This network monitoring solution is built on event-driven architecture and supports Grafana.
OpenNMS has built-in reporting to view the results in a beautiful dashboard and chart. Overall, the user interface of OpenNMS is impressive.
Also, it can be installed in Docker.
Icinga | IT infrastructure solution
In Icinga, you can monitor all the systems in your network, which alerts you in many ways when there are alarms and provides a database for SLA reporting.
Icinga, which started as Nagios Fork in 2009, set free from the constraints of a fork and created Icinga 2, which is significantly faster, easier to configure, and more comfortable to scale.
Netdata | IT infrastructure solution
Netdata provides unparalleled real-time performance troubleshooting for applications and systems and health monitoring. Netdata’s GitHub community has been vital to its growth over the last six years.
Netdata is fast and efficient and designed to run smoothly on all systems. With thousands of metrics, insightful health alarms, and interactive visualizations, you can instantly diagnose slowdowns and anomalies in your infrastructure.
Netdata is free, open-source software and presently runs on physical systems, containers, virtual machines, and IoT/edge devices.
M/Monit | IT infrastructure solution
M/Monit tool is used to monitor the process for Unix and Linux. This software has covered the need to manage multiple identical infrastructure processes.
It uses around 10-15 MB of RAM depending on the number of hosts monitored and runs on any POSIX system. It works with the following database systems:
- MySQL 5.x or later
- PostgreSQL 8.4 or later
- SQLite 3.x
If a process fails, M/Monit can restart it automatically. So, in patchy situations, it can interfere for automatic repair and maintenance. Thus, your systems will be able to gain maximum uptime.
LibreNMS | IT infrastructure solution
LibreNMS is a comprehensive network monitoring system. It is built with PHP/MySQL/SNMP. LibreMNS is compatible with a wide variety of operating systems and network hardware.
It is capable of grouping interfaces based on their prefix. The entire network can be automatically discovered using SNMP, CDP, ARP, FDP, OSPF, LLDP, and BGP.
Final Words
The monitoring software listed above can get you started monitoring various aspects of your IT infrastructure for free. Download them now to see how they work. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, you may want to implement cloud-based APM.
With Nurture IT, you can improve the security of your IT network and systems by implementing cloud and managed security services, the best IT infrastructure solution provider in Bangalore. Also, we can help you analyze your IT architecture, improve data security, and integrate new technologies into your business.