Best Server Monitoring Tools (Free & Paid) for 2024

Server monitoring tools are essential for companies to ensure optimal performance, minimize downtime, and enhance security. Real-time monitoring of key resources like CPU usage, memory utilization, disk space, I/O, and network traffic is crucial to achieving the best results.

Inadequate server monitoring can lead to various issues, from downtime and high CPU usage to slow performance caused by memory leaks. Additionally, failing to monitor servers effectively can expose vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of security breaches and data loss.

Businesses can use built-in commands to monitor the metrics. However, it is always better to opt for server monitoring tools for more streamlined and efficient infrastructure monitoring.

Geekflare has researched and compiled a list of the best server monitoring tools based on key features such as real-time monitoring, alerting capabilities, scalability, integration options, user interface, and cost-effectiveness.

• Nagios – Best for Small to Medium Infrastructure Size
• ManageEngine OpManager – Best for Small to Medium Infrastructure Size
• Zabbix – All-in-one Infrastructure Monitoring
• Prometheus +  Grafana – Time Series Data Visualization for Enterprise
• Collectd – Linux System Statistics Collector
• Icinga – Offer Infrastructure, Cloud and Logs Monitoring
• Munin – Best to Analyse Resource Trends
• Netdata – Offer On-premises and Cloud Deployment Options
• Monit – Offers Basic Server Monitoring
• Sensu – Offer Monitoring as Code
• Datadog – All-in-one Observability Platform for Enterprise
• Sematext – Cloud-based Monitoring Solution
• New Relic – AI-powered Observability Platform
• Glances – Lightweight System Monitoring Tool
• Show moreShow less

Nagios

Nagios is an enterprise-ready open-source monitoring tool. It provides complete Linux operating system (OS) monitoring, including service states, process states, system metrics, etc. 

Nagios offers 4 different types of monitoring solutions.

• Nagios XI: Enterprise-level infrastructure monitoring solution. It offers multi-tenant capabilities, customizability, and improved visibility. 
• Nagios Log Server: Simple log management with alerts set up if potential threats arise.
• Nagios Network Analyser: Help analyse networks, providing in-depth insights and calculating bandwidth.
• Nagios Fusion: Offers centralized view for monitoring infrastructure.

All these products rely on Nagios Core – the monitoring and alerting engine. It integrates well with other apps, including LogicMonitor, Veeman ONE, New Relic and more. It supports a wide range of Linux distributions, making it versatile for various environments.

Nagios Features

• Offers access to powerful Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine
• Provides scalable monitoring solution with capacity planning option.
• Comes with advanced graphs for easy monitoring and resolution.
• Ensure complete network security with real-time data analysis and in-depth insights via Nagios Network Analyser.
• Get a centralized view with outrage visibility using Nagios Fusion

Nagios Pricing

Nagios offers a free version for individual use, while paid options are available for various setups, including small to medium environments, enterprise, and sitewide. Pricing starts at $1,995 for monitoring 50 nodes.

Try Nagios

ManageEngine OpManager

ManageEngine OpManager is an ideal choice for small to medium-sized businesses seeking an efficient network monitoring tool. It enables monitoring of routers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, load balancers, storage devices, firewalls, printers, and switches.

OpManager supports VoIP, server, VMware, and Hyper-V monitoring, providing comprehensive performance insights across your infrastructure. Its complete package for real-time network monitoring, with access to graphs, reports, and a centralized GUI, lets you get to the root cause. Additionally, it provides integrated troubleshooting capabilities.

ManageEngine OpManager Features

• Provides end-to-end network visibility with analytics of network infrastructure, including WAN links, wireless networks, local devices, and more.
• Offers colour-coded alarms with meaningful classified severity levels.
• It comes with mobile apps (Android, iPad, iPhone) to ensure network monitoring on the go.
• Easily visualize the network through Layer 2 Maps, 3D floor, Business views and virtual topology maps.

ManageEngine OpManager Pricing

OpManager is a paid tool with pricing starting at $245 for 25 devices. It also offers professional and enterprise editions starting at $345 (25 devices) and $11,545 (250 devices ) respectively.

Try ManageEngine OpManager

Zabbix

Zabbix is an all-in-one infrastructure monitoring tool that lets you monitor networks, server infrastructure, cloud deployments, services, applications, APIs, IoT devices, sensors, and websites.

Zabbix is an open-source platform that supports both cloud and on-premises deployments. Zabbix Cloud spans five regions—N. Virginia, Frankfurt, Ireland, Singapore, and São Paulo—and offers seven-tier options. Over 250 global partners and vendors provide additional support.

Zabbix Features

• Zabbix supports unlimited scalability that supports smart homes to multi-tenant enterprise environments.
• Offers high availability with 24/7 uptime and proper measures to negate data loss
• Ready-to-use integration templates with popular systems, including Discord, Slack, Zendesk, and AWS.
• It offers professional services for deployment, migration, 24/7 global technical support, hands-on professional training, and more.

Zabbix Pricing

Zabbix Cloud offers a free tier that lets you try out their service. It offers seven-tier options, with pricing starting at $50/month.

Try Zabbix

Prometheus +  Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana give enterprises a solid time series real-time data visualization for Enterprise. SoundCloud created Prometheus in 2012. It is an open-source tool that excels at systems monitoring and altering. With powerful built-in alerting capabilities, it can send notifications based on pre-defined thresholds.

Grafana is an open observability platform that transforms records into insightful dashboards, providing enterprises with essential tools to monitor and visualize infrastructure. Prometheus captures comprehensive system and process metrics, while Grafana presents these in visually engaging dashboards, highlighting performance metrics and resource utilization. Together, they offer a robust solution for observability and monitoring.

Prometheus + Grafana Features

• Help resolve outrages via quick diagnostics and handle machine-centric monitoring and dynamic service-oriented architectures. 
• Handle multidimensional data model with time series data as a metric name.
• Automatically identify monitoring targets via service discovery.
• Get access to PromQL, a built-in query language that allows you to gain insights via data.
• Visualize data via customizable dashboards, displaying data from multiple sources.
• Customize the Grafana dashboard via visualization panels, which are the building blocks of Grafana.

Prometheus + Grafana Pricing

Grafana offers a free forever plan with monthly limits on metrics, visualization, IRM, etc. Its paid plan starts at $4/user/month.

As for Prometheus, it is free to use. However, when a cloud provider provides the managed service, they charge for it.

Try Prometheus Try Grafana

Collectd

Collectd is a free, open-source daemon that gathers system and application performance metrics. It supports various plugins, enabling data collection from diverse sources like CPU, memory, disk, network usage, external devices, and more.

Collectd helps find performance bottlenecks through performance analysis or simply monitor systems. It supports integration with Graphite, Hosted Graphite, Librato, HostedMetrics and Circonus.

Collectd Features

• It offers petty graphs for easy visualization via RRD files.
• Provides performance and portability as it is written in C.
• Enable compatibility with various data storage backends like InfluxDB, Graphite, and Prometheus.
• Can handle 100s to 1000s of metrics, including CPU, I/O, Linux processes runtime, etc.

Collectd Pricing

Collectd is open source and hence free to use.

Try Collectd

Icinga

Icinga provides comprehensive monitoring solutions for infrastructure, cloud, and logs, making it ideal for organizations seeking complete visibility across their IT landscape. Its core capabilities include tracking infrastructure health and performance and insightful data visualization.

Icinga can manage thousands of services and servers with automated monitoring, minimizing manual workload. Additionally, it offers timely notifications for critical issues across various channels, such as Slack, Email, and PagerDuty, ensuring teams can respond swiftly to potential disruptions.

Icinga integrates well with DevOps tools, including AWS, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, and others.

Icinga Features

• Automate data collection and synchronization with the Director or other modules.
• It supports private, public, or hybrid cloud monitoring without depending on the cloud provider’s monitoring capabilities.
• Enterprise-ready with support for multi-tenancy, 24/7 high availability and enterprise-grade support.
• Ability to visualize relations, patterns, and filters through reports.

Icinga Pricing

Businesses need to contact sales to get custom pricing.

Try Icinga

Munin

Munin is a web-based plug-and-play monitoring tool that analyses resource trends. It also helps analyse issues and resolve them to ensure optimal performance. It monitors all connected devices, including SANs, networks, and weather measurements, and presents information in graphs. 

Under the hood, Munin is written in Perl and uses RRDTool (and hence stores data in RRD format). It follows the master/node architecture, where the master node connects with the other nodes and retrieves new data regularly. It also updates graphs if needed.

Munin Features

• Easy to install and configure (can be done in less than 10 minutes).
• A flexible tool with the option to choose between 500+ available plugins covering all types of services.
• Scalable solution with support for up to 100+ node clusters.
• Extensible with the ability to write your own plugins (any language choice).

Munin Pricing

Munin is open-source and, hence, free to use.

Try Munin

Netdata

Netdata is an open-source monitoring tool that offers on-premise and cloud deployment options. It enables organizations to get real-time data visualization with the option to set reliable alerts for data metric anomalies. It supports various operating systems and services, including Linux, docker containers, IoT devices and macOS.

Netdata is easy to install and configure. Once done, it gives all real-time health and performance information, such as disk usage, memory usage, and network usage, among the 100s of other vital metrics.

Netdata Features

• Set automated alarms for anomalous metrics such as performance and get notified via a choice of your app.
• 800+ open-source plugins for different systems, applications, and containers.
• Fast response times with low latency offering real-time insights
• Intuitive and configurable dashboard with powerful automatic visualization for every collected metric.
• Fully customizable and reliable real-time alters

Netdata Pricing

NetData offers two pricing plans: Home and For Work. The Home plan includes a free community on-premises solution with an open-source Agent (OSS). For advanced users, the HomeLab plan costs $90 and provides unlimited metrics, dashboards, and nodes. The For Work plans, designed for professionals, start at $4.50 per node per month.

Try Netdata

Monit

Monit is an open-source utility designed for server monitoring and error recovery. It provides automated maintenance and repairs in response to performance issues or errors. For instance, if Sendmail stops running, Monit will attempt to restart it automatically.

Monit will also look into resource management, such as checking if Apache uses too many resources. If it does, it’ll restart it and send an alert notification. It supports UDP, TCP, and Unix domain sockets for monitoring network connections, including network usage and bandwidth utilization.

Monit is widely available in most Unix distributions, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and other Linux distributions.

Monit Features

• Proactively find and resolve error situations automatically
• Monitor daemon processes such as /etc/init
• Perform tests on programs/scripts and execute actions on exit value
• Monitor general system resources such as Load Average, Memory, and others
• Keep tabs on localhost files and directories via metrics such as checksum, timestamps or size.

Try Monit

Sensu

Sensu is a cloud-based tool that offers monitoring as code by creating an end-to-end observability pipeline. It works for different project setups, be it bare metal or Kubernetes, enabling DevOps to fill gaps in observability.

Sensu succeeds in automating monitoring for dynamic infrastructure. It also supports multi-cloud setup, offering real-time visibility for auto-scaling projects. It comes with native auto-remediation and provides self-heading via Sensu, Ansible, and other third-party APIs.

Sensu Features

• Ability to configure workflow monitoring with the right data format and interface
• Provides alerts via SMS, Slack, email
• Offer proper incident management via PagerDuty, JIRA, and ServiceNow
• Use pre-configured templates for monitoring-as-code workflows with no coding knowledge.

Sensu Pricing

Sensu offers free and paid plans. The free version supports up to 100 nodes and one site. Paid plans include Sensu Go Pro at $3 per node/month and Sensu Go Enterprise at $5 per node/month, both with a 14-day free trial.

Try Sensu

Datadog

Datadog is an all-in-one observability real-time platform. It helps enterprises collect, monitor and correlate server metrics on the cloud or physical servers. It measures and optimizes server performance by monitoring CPU, identifying underutilized machines, improving app performance using trends and optimizing overprovisioned resources.

Datadog provides real-time server status, ensuring that the application runs smoothly. It can look for high latency and its causes, such as overloaded hosts, by monitoring both application data and server metrics.

Datadog offers 800+ integrations, including Azure, Docker, AWS, MongoDB and others.

Datadog Features

• Ability to investigate host-level server issues with tag-based metrics and alters.
• Get a centralized view with visualized server metrics, log events, and application traces.
• Get real-time alerts by setting conditional alerts and choosing custom metrics, data points, and events.
• A configurable dashboard that provides a real-time eagle-eye view on infrastructure health

Datadog Pricing

Datadog offers a free plan with 1-day metric retention and up to 5 hosts. Its paid plan starts at $15 per host per month.

Try Datadog

Sematext

Sematext is a cloud-based monitoring solution which provides real-time Linux monitoring. With Sematext, you can monitor Linux metrics, events, and logs, which leads to minimal downtime, predictable resource usage, and effective scalability on loads.

Sematext offers comprehensive monitoring by allowing you to monitor dozens of Linux metrics, including memory, swap area, memory page count, CPU idle time, and more.

Sematext Features

• Enriched Logs help find issues better and make troubleshooting easy
• Set up and get notified for threshold alters, anomaly detection, metrics, and operating system metrics via PagerDuty, Slack, custom webhooks, email, etc.
• Get access to a pre-built dashboard. You can add/remove components, add new report pages, and combine logs and metrics.
• Easy to install and get started with using Ansible configuration management.

Sematext Pricing

Sematext Cloud pricing starts at $5/month for logs, $2.8 per host/month for monitoring, $9/month for Experience and $2 per monitor/month for Synthetics.

Try Sematext

New Relic

New Relic is an AI-powered observability platform that provides tools to monitor and debug the entire stack. It is a powerful monitoring software that lets you understand the real cause before it reaches the customers.

New Relic helps process all the generated telemetry data and monitor the traces, logs, metrics, and events from a single place. AI enhances monitoring and instantly alters if it finds any unpredictable anomaly or data.

New Relic also provides a single view of workflows and the entire stack, including upstream and downstream dependencies, services, clusters, and databases.

New Relic Features

• Access over 775+ free integrations such as PHP, Node.js, .NET, MySQL, and others.
• Ability to monitor the full stack and get a centralized view of all processes and workflows.
• Get access to AI-enabled intelligence to get notified of anomalies instantly.
• Offers code-level analysis and automatically tracks SLAs for optimum uptime and performance.

New Relic Pricing

New Relic follows pay-as-you-grow plans. It also offers a free plan with 100 GB data ingest, access to 30+ capabilities, and data retention. Its paid plans have custom pricing, and you need to contact sales for a quote.

Try New Relic

Glances

Glances is a lightweight system monitoring tool that supports cross-platform implementation (Free BSD, GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X). It is web-based and hence can be used from anywhere you want, especially for remote system monitoring. It monitors key performance metrics, including CPU, Memory, Sensors, Disk I/O, Process list, and others.

There are similar types of lightweight monitoring tools, including:

• Conky: a lightweight and free system monitor that supports 300 built-in objects.
• Psutil: a cross-platform library that retrieves information from systems and processes in Python. It is used for profiling, system monitoring and process management.
• Oshi: a free-to-use OS and hardware information library for Java. It helps retrieve system information such as processes, memory, CPU, etc.
• Gtop: a system monitoring dashboard for a terminal that supports Linux, OSX and Windows.

Glances Features

• It provides access to the RESTful JSON API and XML-RPC server.
• Supports export system statistics via Cassandra, StatsD, InfluxDB, ElasticSearch, CSV and RabbitMQ.
• Supports dedicated Grafana dashboard.
• Inform administrators via alerts if any anomaly takes place.

Glances Pricing

Glances is open-source and free to use.

Try Glances