Open source server monitoring software windows

Prometheus is built to monitor Kubernetes and Docker , and is almost always used alongside Grafana for visualizations. Prometheus has its own dashboard, called the Prometheus Expression Browser , which is a good console for deep diving into your metrics. However, Grafana is a better dashboard tool, which supersedes the Expression Browser for long-term data monitoring, alerting, and notification. Prometheus has a few downsides. The first problem is long-term storage, where the open source project is only configured to store data for a maximum of 14 days.

This can be time-consuming and expensive. The second problem occurs when monitoring multi-process applications as seen in many Python web apps. Prometheus is not built for multi-process multi-threaded applications, but work-arounds are possible. To solve the issues with remote-storage and independently managing an in-house Prometheus setup, MetricFire offers Hosted Prometheus. You can use Prometheus directly in-app, and skip the hassle of installation, remote-storage set up, and other configurations.

Although Grafana is only a dashboard tool, and not a full server monitoring tool, it is pivotal in any monitoring stack. Grafana can build great graphs, alert on complex alert rules, and push the alerting information directly to your smart phone with notifications. Grafana is easy to use and easy to set up. For more information on how to set up Grafana, check out our article on Getting Started With Grafana.

You can also see our article Our Favorite Grafana Dashboards , which shows exactly what we watch when doing server monitoring. Grafana allows you to build dashboards out of panels, where each panel consists of one type of visualization. Each panel can be configured to watch specific metrics coming from any data source in your monitoring stack. Kibana has some similarities with Grafana, but it plays a more specific role.

Kibana is the console and UI for Elasticsearch and Logstash, and it can not exist without using those two technologies as their data source. We detail their functionality, such as discovering devices, monitoring network equipment and servers, identifying network trends, graphically presenting monitoring results, and even backing up switch configurations and routers.

These tools are not ranked — you should choose the one that best suits your needs. Paessler PRTG is a network monitoring tool suitable both for small and enterprise environments. More than just a server monitoring solution, PRTG it can monitor any IT-related resource that connects to your network.

The setup is dynamic; monitoring capabilities can grow or shrink with the business requirements of your organization. Plus, it can send email and SMS alerts based on your custom threshold levels, so you can adjust the sensitivity of specific servers in order to get more frequent warnings from critical servers and almost no noise from non-critical ones. Administrators can view the entire server environment at a glance, and customizable dashboards and reports enable them to easily generate specific graphs and analytics for specific needs.

There are predefined templates to speed the installation and configuration process. Other key features include flexible alert methods, multiple user interfaces to choose from, failover-tolerant monitoring, distributed monitoring, and customizable maps and dashboards.

The tool has a day trial license, and there is a free version with limited functionality. Observium is a tool for monitoring network equipment and servers that has a huge list of supported devices using the SNMP protocol. Observium has relatively easy installation and configuration. It is installed as its own server with a dedicated URL. You can enter the graphical interface and start adding hosts and networks, and set ranges for automatic detection and SNMP data so that Observium can explore the surrounding networks and collect data for each detected system.

Depending on the device, data can be collected and displayed for every detected port. The easy-to-use user interface provides advanced capabilities for statistical display of data, as well as diagrams and graphs. Observium can display information about the state of the CPU, RAM, data storage, power supply, temperature and so on from the event log. Observium works great as a virtual machine, so it can quickly become the main tool for obtaining information about the status of servers and networks.

This is a great way to add auto discovery and graphical representation to a network of any size. A free edition with limited functionality is available. Even the best infrastructure monitoring tools are not enough. If you detect a Windows Server performance issue, you need to be able to quickly inspect system settings and analyze the latest configuration changes to determine the cause of the issue and fix it before business processes suffer.

Therefore, a system monitoring tool is also essential. Netwrix Auditor for Windows Server provides complete visibility into your system settings and changes. For example, you can easily see the current state of your system and review all changes that were made to your Windows servers, such as installation of software and hardware and changes to scheduled tasks, services and registry. You can configure alerts to be notified any time there is a suspicious change or series of changes.

The application is part of the Netwrix Auditor platform, which delivers information in a unified and consistent way across your infrastructure, thanks to a consolidated audit trail across a wide variety of IT systems, including Active Directory, Windows Server, Oracle Database and network devices.

Product installation is straightforward, and the UI is user friendly and robust. Reports and alerts are very clear and nicely structured, with detailed data for each reported event, which makes Netwrix Auditor a great tool for monitoring setup and changes in Windows Server, network devices and other key systems in your infrastructure. Plus, you get file analysis, user behavior and blind spot analysis, risk assessment, built-in search of audit data, alerts on threat patterns, and user activity video recording.

There is a day free trial, as well as a free community edition with limited functionality. Datadog is a surveillance, safety and analytics tool for developers, IT operation teams, security engineers and cloud-based business users.

It combines and automates infrastructure surveillance, application performance tracking and log management to ensure that your whole technology stack is tracked uniformly and in real time. It can be an excellent network and service monitoring service for mid-sized IT shops, thanks to tons of integrations, dashboards and customizable alerts.

Datadog is highly praised by service providers for its simple cloud-hosted model, customizable views, and ability to seamlessly aggregate metrics and events across your full stack: SaaS and cloud providers, automation tools, monitoring and instrumentation, source control and bug tracking, databases and common server components. However, it does not have automatic device detection and requires a lengthy initial setup process.

There is a day free trial that allows you to monitor as many servers as you like. Fortinet Panopta is a web-based SaaS monitoring solution that helps service providers and businesses track network and server performance in cloud, on premises and hybrid environments. The built-in incident handler provides a centralized platform for managing incidents and resolved issues. The cloud monitoring functionality of Panopta can perform automatic checks on application performance, disk space usage, load balancers and many other applications.

Dashboards provide histograms, topology charts and color-coded heat maps to visualize, filter and segment data. As a result, this system provides highly versatile testing, monitoring and automation platform for all major infrastructure devices including servers, databases, firewalls, routers, and more. Additionally, there is a time investment to learn and set up the system; however, it is time well spent, since once you understand the system, it will help you achieve process transparency in your organization.

Nagios can be complicated to install, set up, and configure. Once this is done, the tool offers metrics to monitor server performance, remediate services, and reporting. Nagios Core provides only limited monitoring capabilities, unlike Nagios XI, which is a commercial tool with added features. If you are comfortable setting up your own custom dashboards, or have time to learn and master everything Nagios has to offer, it can very well be the solution for you.

Ganglia is an open-source BSD license monitoring system designed especially for high-performance computing systems, such as clusters and grids. It has a scalable and distributed architecture based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. One of its goals is to engineer data structures and algorithms for maximum efficiency, resulting in overheads for each node.

Large clusters around the world use the platform, especially in university settings. This is not surprising given the fact that Ganglia evolved out a project at the University of California, Berkeley and was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. CollectD is a popular open-source daemon, which collects basic system performance statistics over time and stores the data it collects in multiple formats, such as the RRD files that Cacti can use to graph the data.

There are a number of plug-ins for various systems that allow you to collect data beyond the essential system metrics, such as CPU and memory. CollectD is commonly used to find performance bottlenecks, monitor and predict system load over time, and create alerts. CollectD is commonly used in DevOps projects as an industry-standard, open-source collection agent.

It is usually integrated with a graphing tool, such as Graphite, Grafana, or Cacti. The Spiceworks free monitoring tool can provide insights to many aspects of your infrastructure, such as servers, switches, SNMP devices, and services. LogRhythm NetMon Freemium is a free version of LogRhythm NetMon that offers similar business-grade module capturing and analysis abilities as the full version. Though there are restrictions or limits on data processing and module storage, the freemium version still permits the users to perform network risk detection and response functions built on data packet analysis.

The advanced IP Scanner allows the scanning of devices on the network and remotely regulates the connected computers and other resources. It provides the ability to switch computers off from the tool if the device is not in use and is using resources. AppNeta PathTest is a free network volume testing tool intended to aid businesses to comprehend the true ability of their network.

It deliberately floods your network with data packets to fill the network to its full capacity. Users can set the duration of this test up to a maximum of 10 seconds and run the tests at any time. Monitoring provides supervisors a crisp view of the services, applications, and devices running on their network and the ability to track the performance of these resources.

This facilitates active management rather than responding to issues as and when they happen. Open-source monitoring tools are utilized to monitor the status of the framework being used, so as to have the warnings of defects, failures, or issues and to improve them. There are monitoring tools for servers, network, cloud infrastructure, containers, databases, security, execution, site and web use, and applications.

Sometimes, it is wise to use default monitoring systems that come with the infrastructure providers. One example is the AWS cloudwatch. However, open-source monitoring tools provide a lot of functionality to monitor your infrastructure components with a lot of customization. Opting for an appropriate open source monitoring solution for your business is not as easy as it seems. IT professionals like the Network and DevOps Engineers need to consider multiple factors while searching for an open-source monitoring solution for their enterprises, such as compatibility, facility, effortlessness, and budget.

So if you want to become a devops engineer , I would highly suggest you look at the open-source monitoring tools. An author, blogger, and DevOps practitioner. In his spare time, he loves to try out the latest open source technologies.

He works as an Associate Technical Architect. Also, the opinions expressed here are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his previous or current employer. Gaurav was one of the earliest software developers at SlideShare-LinkedIn which was followed by working for companies like Naukri. He is a techie not only by profession but also by passion and believes that going online is the future of education.

You can connect with him through LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter and squareboat. It would be great mentioning VictoriaMetrics as well. This is an easy to use monitoring solution optimized for low resource usage.