Free is one of the best useful software in network management platform. Whenever your system become slow or falling down it notifies network administrators by SMS, Emails etc.Now a day, IT administrators understand the need of network performance monitoring tools within the organization.

1. Solarwinds Capabilities
2. Solarwinds Network Monitoring Tool Free Download
3. Solarwinds Network Monitoring Tool

But even with these monitoring tools, a simple accident can cost millions.There are numbers of open source network monitoring tools available in the market to monitor system performance but choose best network management software which is affordable and easy to access. Here we list out some of best free network monitoring tools to monitor devices, services, ports or protocols and analyzing traffic on your network. Also read about. Table of Contents.#1. MotadataNetwork performance monitoring is actually a part of network management where the system constantly monitors a network or erroneous components. In case of outages or failure network performance monitoring tools should ideally inform or alert the network admin.

Every organization wishes to make their IT infrastructure more agile with the use of proactive approach to Network Monitoring.Motadata is a unified monitoring solution that provides deep insights on NMS, flow and log data along with custom alerts. Also Read: How to in PC #2.Nagios is released in 1999. This is the network monitoring tool where you can always monitor and maintains your system critical, server and application are always up and running well. Nagios is written in C, so it has everything that network monitor administrator require in monitoring package.Nagios monitors and alerts servers, application and switches. This is the best monitoring tool for enterprises because when something goes wrong it gives alerts and again informs them when the issue resolves.Previously, Nagios was known as NetSaint and this written and maintained by Ethan Galstand and the developers team.

Cacti Network Performance MonitoringCacti is an open-source web-based network monitoring tools. This graphing tool designed as a front-end application for the open-source. By using Cacti network monitoring tools, the system administrator can monitor and graph network traffic monitor, system load, network bandwidth utilization, etc.Cacti provide fast and advanced graphs with a useful user management interface.

This network management software use industry-standard data logging RRD tool.Cacti was released in 2001 and developed by Cacti group. Cacti used in mid-sized user LANs that contain many devices. Wireshark Network Performance Monitoring ToolsWireshark is a very popular free network monitoring tool. This tool is an interactive network protocol analyzer and capture utility. Choose the interface you want to bind and click on the green shark fin icon to start when you launch Wireshark and these packets immediately start capturing data. When you collect all the data which you need, you can download the data file to analyze in another application.Wireshark allows you to analyze network communications in as much as details you require. You can check connections and also other detail like HTTP.Most system admins use Wireshark because of it’s free and offers highly detailed data for network analyzing needs.

#5.Solarwinds is another good network monitoring tools. More people are using Solarwind to monitor important infrastructures like servers, switches, SNMP device and more. This network monitoring tool is easy to install and easy to setup. Also, you can quickly add the device to Solarwind dashboard and to check lighted data fast.Solarwind gives you real-time network detail and spots slow, sluggish or overwhelmed systems. You can monitor your system before it crashed. You will get a notification when your system gets down so you can resolve it before the user call you.

#6.Open NMS was released in 1999. This network monitoring tool provides event management, service monitoring, and performance measurement.

This is designed for large enterprise-level businesses. The software is free. The user can invest their efforts and time to build a solution around software. Or they can hire an expert to build a solution around.Some of the key features are: Event management, notification push, device discovery, Service Monitoring, Performance Measurement, Charting support, Multi-Resource Performance Reports, Help Desk Plugins #7.PRTG network monitoring freeware is another very popular network monitoring tool.

The operator easily can monitors network availability of protocols including Netflow, SNMP, and WMI. PRTG allows you to use a web-based interfaces and apps for Android and iOS. The main feature I would say is that you can create a report in HTML/PDF format.This is a comprehensive Network Monitoring tool that offers more than 170 sensor types for application monitoring, SLA monitoring, virtual server monitoring, QoS monitoring. #8.This is a network management system software that is designed for monitoring and tracking the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.Zabbix network monitoring tool mainly uses MySQL, PostSQL, SQLite, Oracle and IBM to store data. Zabbix is a simple and clean GUI so the operator can easily manage it.Zabbix also supports agentless monitoring with using technologies like SNMP, Telnet, SSH, ICMP etc. This is the most widely used open source monitoring tool after Nagios.

Splunk Network MonitoringSplunk network monitoring tools are data collection and analysis platform that allows you to monitor, collect and analyze data from various sources on your network like device, event log, services, UDP/TCP traffic etc. The operator can set up alerts to notify them when something is going well or you can use Splunk’s extensive search, reporting and dashboard features to collect most of the data.Splunk allows you to install Apps to increase system functionality.Note: Keep in mind that if you downloading and installing Splunk first time, it automatically installs the enterprise 60 trial version. Zenoss Network Monitoring ToolZenoss network monitoring tool is mainly an open source networking application which is used for monitoring issues within the networks. Zenoss mainly based on Zope application server and it helps system administrators troubleshoot problems across various servers.Zenoss core is powerful open source IT monitoring platform which monitors application, storage, server, networking and virtualization to supply availability and performance statistics. Zenoss has a high-performance advance notification and event handling system.When you log in to Zenoss Core Web UI first time, you need to create your accounts and add your few devices or hosts to monitor. Once you were done, it takes you to dashboard tab where you can use Dashboard, Infrastructure, Events, Advanced tabs and Reports to configure Zenoss Core and review reports and events that need attention. Easy Net MonitorThis is a very lightweight network monitoring tool where you can monitor your local and remote hosts to ensure that they are working or not.

You don’t need to install it, just download and start using for free. When you launch easy net monitor, you found it as an icon on the notification area of your system. OpManager by ManageEngineOpManager is another good network management software that allows network admin of large and medium-small organization to monitor effectively network flow. ManageEngine offers a monitoring tools for monitoring networks, servers and data centers effectively.Network monitoring software always keeps your organization network on top. It helps network admin to easily monitor and manage the network. Hope this is the top best free network management tool that system admin searching for.

Solarwinds Capabilities

Solarwinds Network Monitoring Tool Free Download

We are going to add more network monitoring software in this list. Kindly suggest us good and useful network monitoring tools you used.You might want to read.

In this article, we will review the which is one of the major network monitoring tools available on the market. We will also set up a lab environment to install and configure SolarWinds NPM to monitor some devices.has several features including network discovery, availability monitoring (e.g. Node is up/down), health status (e.g.

Solarwinds Network Monitoring Tool

CPU usage), performance monitoring (e.g. ) and so on.There are other SolarWinds products that complement NPM including the Network Configuration Manager (NCM) and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) but we will restrict our discussion to the NPM in this article. Lab SetupTo make this article as practical as possible, we will install to monitor a Windows Server 2012 and two Cisco routers in a lab environment.

The lab setup is as shown below:For this evaluation, I launched an EC2 instance on which the SolarWinds NPM will be installed. I’m using Windows Server 2012 R2 as my base OS even though Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2016 are also supported by SolarWinds NPM.For the networking side of things, I’m using to simulate my routers. To create a network between the Windows Server and the GNS3 lab, I created a loopback interface on the Windows Server and then connected one of the routers to this loopback interface.Hint: Adding a loopback interface to newer Windows operating systems is very simple. Just search for “Loopback Manager” and follow the instructions on the command prompt window that opens.

For older versions of Windows, will help.The configuration on the routers is simple: IP addresses, EIGRP and SNMP community strings. Note: If you had to choose between SNMP and WMI, you should probably go for SNMP except in cases where SNMP does not support what you need, like Windows-specific information.SNMP consumes less resources (bandwidth, CPU, etc.) and will usually work across a firewall or NAT connection.As you can see, the default “public” and “private” community strings are included in the wizard. For security reasons, you should never use these default community strings in your network. Also if possible, use SNMPv3 instead.In our case, we will create a new community string of “ cisco123” (SNMPv2c) which is what we configured on our Cisco routers.Hint: You can also enable SNMP on other devices like Windows and Unix. Use as a guide.On the next screen, we can enter WMI credentials.