Whether you're a sysadmin or network administrator, knowing about issues before they become problems is vital. Network monitoring tools help you do just that, giving you real-time insights into network and system performance that let you optimize performance and head off problems before they strike. While some of these tools offer more features if you pay a premium, most of the free tools offer you features such as alerts, process monitoring, and real-time network performance dashboards. Below you'll find 13 free network monitoring tools that will help you detect when your network is down — and hopefully help you prevent it from going down in the first place. Microsoft Network Monitor While Microsoft no longer supports it, is a handy packet analyzer that captures network traffic for analysis and troubleshooting. It is a significantly more powerful tool for capturing and analyzing protocol messages. Nagios is a well-known name in the world of network monitoring software and offers a free version of its software. Full disclaimer: Nagios is free as long as you use a single license; more than that will cost you. That aside, Nagios Core offers a comprehensive monitoring solution that tracks applications, servers, services, network protocols, and system metrics, among other things. Nagios Core also offers integration with third-party applications and hundreds of free add-ons from an active community. Spiceworks Network Monitor is a free monitoring solution that features process and service monitoring, a dynamic dashboard, ping check, agentless monitoring, network performance monitoring, and virtual monitoring. Spiceworks Network Monitor also allows you to set up customizable alerts and view historical data to conduct forensics work and prevent future issues. You can monitor up to 25 devices with Spiceworks Network Monitor. Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard A little different from other options on this list, offers connectivity monitoring that's specifically geared towards applications and cloud-based services. Once configured, you'll see a matrix grid of the applications and devices you're keeping an eye on — red means the applications is offline, yellow means it's slower than normal, and green means it's good to go. If all the applications at one location on different devices are down, you know there's a connectivity problem there. If only one cloud-based service is down across different locations, you can conclude it's a problem with the service provider. Other features include the ability to draw your own maps and add custom devices, gain direct access to device management tools, and discover a large number of brands and devices on your network. The latest version of Zabbix gives users a new event tag, which helps organize work flows. There's one drawback, however, for small-to-medium-sized businesses: Since Zabbix is built for enterprises, it doesn't necessarily scale well to smaller environments. Icinga 2 is a completely free network monitoring application that is Linux based and offers a real-time dashboard of network performance and resource availability. With dynamic notifications that let you know when something network monitoring tools down, Icinga offers object-based configuration, custom commands and runtime macros, and logical dependencies to simplify how you define relationships. Icinga also offers customization options, allowing you to pick from network monitoring tools different interfaces. WireShark One of the more popular and widely used network monitoring tools, WireShark offers granular network packet analysis. In other words, you can use it to help troubleshoot issues, conduct forensics work after an issue, and fine-tune system and network performance. Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, WireShark has a number of filters to you help you focus on the information you need. Known for its detailed graphs, its intuitive interface, and auto network monitoring tools features, Observium is a simple monitoring network monitoring tools that works with large and small installations. But there's one thing that Observium lacks: real-time alerts. Combining it with another product like Nagios, which does provide alerts, is recommended. Share your favorite network monitor application in the comments below. This year Mikrotik actually updated the code and is in active development. The one snag is that the latest server side software network monitoring tools only run on Mikrotik equipment. They are starting to monetize this free offering. I'll still use it for that. Great to see Kimberley, from the training videos, on here. Nice to have someone in development doing them rather than a paid actor. I'll still use it for that. Great to see Kimberley, from the training videos, on here. Nice to have someone in development doing them rather than a paid actor. Maybe our node-based licensing can help?.
