Table of Contents
Server outages cost businesses an average of $300,000 per hour. But with the right monitoring solution, 90% of issues can be prevented or quickly mitigated.
This article will explore the 10 most popular server monitoring tools based on market share, reviews, and new capabilities. I‘ll compare their key strengths so you can determine which tool best meets your needs.
The top 10 tools are:
- Datadog
- SolarWinds SAM
- Zabbix
- PRTG
- Nagios XI
- Icinga
- Netdata
- Pulseway
- Site24x7
- Observium
These solutions lead the market thanks to their breadth, scalability, analytics, and emerging support for cloud infrastructure monitoring. Next I‘ll provide an overview of key considerations when evaluating options.
What to Look for in a Server Monitoring Tool
With infrastructure increasingly complex across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud, a modern monitoring tool must provide:
Comprehensive Infrastructure Visibility: Monitor servers, VMs, containers, storage, networks, apps, logs, and more from one unified platform. Over 200 out-of-the-box integrations accelerate time-to-value.
Automatic Discovery and Mapping: Auto-detect interdependencies so you can track how issues propagate across layers like app tiers, databases, microservices, and infrastructure.
Intelligent Alerting and Predictive Capabilities: Leverage techniques like anomaly detection, forecasting, and machine learning to analyze metrics, events, and logs to provide actionable, ranked insights versus just more data.
Faster Troubleshooting: Hop between dashboards filtered by high-level business services while drilling down to host metrics and application logs to diagnose the root cause of problems quicker.
Scalability and Reliability: Collect and analyze metrics from across large, dynamic on-premise and cloud environments while delivering 99.9% uptime of the monitoring system itself.
Cloud Monitoring: Provide visibility not just for servers and VMs, but also for microservices, functions, queues, NoSQL databases, and more hosted across public cloud platforms.
Optimized Pricing: Consume monitoring as an operational expense based on volume metrics like events per second or number of hosts monitored to maximize flexibility and cost control.
Keeping these requirements in mind, let‘s explore the top server monitoring tools of 2023:
1. Datadog
Datadog is the most widely adopted modern monitoring platform with over 15,000 customers including Salesforce, Spotify, and Samsung. It was named a leader in Gartner‘s 2022 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring & Observability.
Datadog provides complete visibility across infrastructure, apps, logs, networks, and cloud providers in a unified platform designed specifically for dynamic, hybrid, and cloud-native environments.
With Datadog, you can:
- Get out-of-the-box visibility across 200+ technologies thanks to pre-built integrations and machine learning-based auto-detection as new resources are deployed.
- Enable collaborative troubleshooting with fully customizable dashboards shared across teams to speed up issue resolution.
- Leverage advanced analytics powered by algorithms that learn expected behavior to detect anomalies fast even for complex systems.
- Scale monitoring easily as cloud usage grows while only paying for active infrastructure monitored based on volume ingested.
Unique platform capabilities like continuous intelligence applied across metrics, traces, logs, and more led Gartner to name Datadog a leader among APM solutions two years consecutively.
2. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)
SolarWinds SAM gives deep visibility into both physical and virtual servers. It ranked #1 for network management software in G2‘s 2022 awards based on user reviews.
Trusted by over 400,000 technology professionals, SolarWinds solutions are built for on-premise environments leveraging standard protocols like WMI, SNMP, and SSH versus relatively newer methods like log analysis.
SolarWinds SAM capabilities include:
- Agentless monitoring with over 1200 metric definitions applied out-of-the-box.
- Automatic discovery and dependency mapping between applications and infrastructure.
- Predictive intelligence to forecast resource capacity using machine learning algorithms.
- Tight integration across other SolarWinds tools like the Network Performance Monitor for unified IT monitoring.
SolarWinds has one of the most intuitive interfaces optimized for quickly visualizing performance issues. The Orion platform enables unified views across on-premise infrastructure.
For organizations wanting best-in-class, affordably priced monitoring tailored for hybrid infrastructure, SolarWinds is likely the premier choice.
Comparison of Top 5 Server Monitoring Tools
Here is a side-by-side comparison highlighting key capabilities across the leading solutions:
| Datadog | SolarWinds SAM | Zabbix | PRTG | Nagios XI | |
| Cloud Monitoring | Yes | Limited | Yes | No | Yes |
| Automatic Discovery | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Machine Learning Analytics | Yes | Yes | Limited | No | Yes |
| Customizable Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scalability | Millions of Metrics / Second | 100,000 Metrics / Second | 50,000 Checks / Minute | Unlimited Endpoints | 50,000 Checks / Minute |
This table highlights strengths around automation, analytics, customization, and scale across top solutions. Now let‘s explore the remaining tools:
3. Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool popular for its flexibility…
4. PRTG
Paessler AG‘s PRTG Network Monitor is a unified infrastructure monitoring tool…
5. Nagios XI
Nagios XI provides enterprise-grade monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure…
Best Tools for Different Use Cases
Here are specific recommendations based on your monitoring objectives:
Migrating Infrastructure to the Cloud: Datadog leads in supporting cloud-native technologies and delivering a unified hybrid/multi-cloud view.
Monitoring Large-Scale & Complex Environments: Nagios XI and Zabbix both scale to sustain high throughput suitable for enterprise IT environments.
Unified Monitoring Across Networks, Servers, & Apps: PRTG delivers broad infrastructure visibility through pre-configured sensors that provide out-of-the-box monitoring.
Open Source Customization & Control: Icinga and Zabbix give the flexibility to tailor monitoring capabilities leveraging open-source components.
Monitoring IT Infrastructure on a Budget: SolarWinds provides very robust server monitoring priced affordably for mid-market use.
Getting Started With Server Monitoring Best Practices
To get the most value from your monitoring tool while minimizing disruption, I recommend:
Establishing Centralized Logging: Standardize log formats, destinations, and aggregation to enable correlation across app tiers.
Creating Monitoring Groups Based on Service Dependencies: Group interdependent infrastructure supporting key business services for unified troubleshooting.
Setting Baselines to Learn Typical Behavior Patterns: Profile standard utilization by time of day, day of week, and time of year to detect abnormal deviations.
Beginning with Alarm Thresholds That Are Too Strict: Start conservative on what constitutes an anomaly to avoid alert fatigue as you tune notifications over time.
Reviewing Metrics and Events Daily: Scan dashboards regularly to catch emerging issues proactively even if thresholds aren‘t crossed yet.
Get Started Protecting Business Uptime Today
I hope this overview has helped narrow down which server monitoring platforms make the most sense for your IT environment and use cases.
Don’t leave business continuity at risk – evaluate options like Datadog, SolarWinds, and Nagios XI to start profiling infrastructure health today. Reach out if you have any other questions as you get started. Here’s to maximizing application availability and performance!