Top 10 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools

The global market size for IT infrastructure monitoring tools is valued at US $3,426.2 million in 2023 and is projected to hit US $15,554.4 million by 2033, recording a CAGR of 16.3 percent. Such rapid growth can be attributed to three key drivers.

As more companies embrace digital transformation, it means that more and more critical functions are fully dependent on IT. This calls for round the clock IT Infrastructure Monitoring to ensure that systems are constantly working as they should.

While the need for IT infrastructure monitoring tools continues to grow, we acknowledge that you may have found it challenging to choose the right tool for your business needs.

We also understand why this is the case: From networks, through servers, storage and cloud infrastructure, each tool is designed to meet a specific monitoring need. This means you cannot simply pick any tool in the market and trust it to monitor your infrastructure. You need to understand what the tool is specifically designed to achieve, and if indeed it excels at that role.

With this understanding, we analyzed hundreds of competing IT Infrastructure Monitoring tools with a view to help organizations make informed decisions.

From this analysis, we selected what in our view are the top IT infrastructure monitoring tools. This selection is also based on user reviews and unique features.

What are the top IT infrastructure monitoring tools?

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
2. Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring
3. ManageEngine OpManager Plus
4. PRTG Network Monitor
5. New Relic
6. Dynatrace
7. AppDynamics
8. Prometheus
9. Sematext
10. Nagios

1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

SolarWinds NPM is an IT infrastructure monitoring software designed to offer on-site and remote database performance and data Ops monitoring. It performs analysis, diagnosis and optimization for business-critical applications over a global network.

Unique features

• Netpath and PerfStack for easy troubleshooting: You can perform synthesis and analysis of data from multiple components to identify the root cause of problems. You can also drag and drop metrics onto a shared common timeline for correlation and association.
• Intelligent maps: SolarWinds Orion Maps automatically generates contextual maps. It also establishes a physical and logical relationship between monitored entities. The health status of related entities is displayed for easy troubleshooting.

Pros

• Offers detailed analysis for easy troubleshooting through the help of critical path visualization, advanced alerting and intelligent mapping features.
• Very reliable, stable and resilient to crashing and freezing.
• Highly scalable. You can increase usage with additional servers and a gazillion of nodes.

Cons

• NPM offers limited integration capabilities, especially with video applications.

Pricing

SolarWinds NPM pricing plans include a 30-day fully functional free trial, downloadable from the site. There are two licensing options (Subscription and perpetual licensing).

However, no monthly subscriptions or terms are available for on-premise solutions. Instead, there are annual subscriptions billed upfront for the number of years you are subscribed.

2. Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring

Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring is designed to to help DevOps and IT teams track the performance and health of hosts and containers.

Unique features

• Detailed tracing and logging capabilities: The solution combines log filtering, cloud security management, distributed tracing and synthetic testing for quick performance analysis and resolution.
• Data-driven decision making: It offers easy multi-platform integration, Service Level Objective (SLOs) management and Continuous Integration (CI) visualization to easily identify bottlenecks.

Pros

• Offers a wide range of customizable integrations through Datadog’s API
• Presents integrated visibility of programs and services utilized by IT teams across development and operations, providing actionable insights
• The open-source agent provides a unified experience of on-premise and cloud monitoring

Cons

• Lacks versioning control for synthetic tests, making it difficult to track changes.

Pricing

Datadog’s pricing plans include a free option and two priced packages (Pro and Enterprise). The free plan offers 1-day data retention and supports a maximum of 5 hosts.

On the other hand, the paid plans are based on a monthly subscription but can also be billed annually or on demand.

3. OpManager Plus by ManageEngine

OpManage Plus is an enterprise network monitoring tool designed to offer top-notch SLA customer service, proactive IT fault management and consistent IT infrastructure performance.

To achieve its mandate, the tool offers multi-level visibility into IT infrastructure application performance, IT infrastructure security, network performance, server and storage IT operations.

Unique features

• Faster fault discovery: The solution provides color-coded visualizations of devices in real time that you can locate on Google or business maps for an in-depth analysis of a network fault.
• Advanced first-level automation: With the help of the workflow feature, you can create automated templates for ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting faults in a network.

Pros

• The solution offers multi-platform visibility across wireless access points, routers, firewalls, switches, load balancers, virtual servers, printers, etc., in real time.
• Offers easy deployment with the help of the Discovery Rule Engine, which allows easy automation of activities such as adding monitors during the initial discovery.
• It’s an all-in-one solution that takes care of infrastructure performance and security, networks, server and storage operations instead of having separate monitoring solutions for each IT operation.

Cons

• Limited customization options

Pricing

OpManager Plus pricing model includes a 30-day free trial and paid device-based licensing. The free trial is a downloadable Windows and Linux application. The paid option is based on the number of devices you want to monitor, billed in the form of license packs.

4. PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor is an agentless network monitoring tool designed to run on a Windows device within your network. You can collect performance-related metrics and resolve issues related to your network.

Unique features

• Multi-platform infrastructure monitoring: With the ITOps features,IT teams can create real-time dashboards in multiple PRTG platforms.
• In-depth reporting: The tool allows you to collect monitoring data, analyze it with graphs, export it as HTML, PDF, CSV or XML and process it. You can also produce on-demand reports or schedule reports to generate on a weekly, daily or monthly basis.

Pros

• Highly stable and dependable.
• Comes with over ten in-built technologies, including push, play alarms, audio files, email, and triggering HTTP requests. The on-premise tool also supports EXE file execution and SMS text messaging.
• It is easy to set up and use

Cons

• The solution is native to the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Pricing

PRTG pricing plans include a 30-day free trial and a paid perpetual licensing option. The perpetual licensing entails up to five different packages, determined by the number of aspects to be monitored and the number of devices.

5. New Relic

New Relic is a full-stack monitoring tool designed to track live web applications and mobile apps’ performance. It alerts IT teams of downtime so they can resolve the issue before users realize it.

Unique features

• Transaction tracking: The solution allows you to view your application’s load time to determine slow-loading applications and conduct a root cause analysis to optimize them.
• Customer error logging: Whenever a system presents an error, New Relic logs the errors, providing more context to simplify inspection and troubleshooting.

Pros

• New Relic offers a user-friendly interface and visuals, which is easily customizable.
• The free tier option is generous enough to offer significant features without compromising their functionalities.
• The solution is highly scalable and easily integrates with over 600 platforms and technologies.

Cons

• Extensive features and functionalities can be overwhelming to new users.

Pricing

New Relic’s pricing includes a free and paid option. The free option (standard package) offers 100 GB of data ingestion per month and is limited to 5 full platform users.

On the other hand, the paid options (Pro and Enterprise) offer advanced features with unlimited full-platform users.

6. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an intelligent application monitoring tool. It’s designed to help monitor the performance and availability of storage, network, memory and CPU utilization. It utilizes an AI-powered data platform to provide anomaly detection and precise root cause for detected issues.

Unique features

• Context-rich analytics: Dynatrace leverages the power of a causational data lake house (Grail) with a massively parallel processing (MPP) engine to provide AI-powered analytics.
• Topology mapping: Dynatrace’s Smartscape Dynamic Environment provides visualization of all multi-tier dynamic relationships for ease of performance tracking and resolution of issues.

Pros

• The solution is highly reliable with a guaranteed ≤ 99.5% uptime.
• Its elastic grid architecture easily scales to over 100, 000 hosts
• It provides top-notch security backed with a SOC 2 Type II security and availability certification.

Cons

• The solution requires an expert to advise on monitoring data and analytics, especially for new users.

Pricing

Dynatrace pricing includes a 15-day free trial with no credit card requirements and a paid subscription. The paid subscription is billed per hour, session or multi-year contract, depending on the scope of business needs.

7. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is an application performance monitoring tool. It’s designed to provide full-stack visibility into applications, servers and databases in hybrid and cloud-native environments.

Unique features

• Real-time adaptation: The tool allows you to configure your applications with the help of the Smart Code Infrastructure, offering real-time reflection of changes made to the application environment.
• Full-stack monitoring capabilities: The correlation between low-level infrastructure bottlenecks and application performance provides efficient root cause analysis and quick remediation.

Pros

• Offers a comprehensive suite of business-focused analytics
• Provides both infrastructure and user experience monitoring
• Provides easy drill down to every transaction for faster root cause analysis

Cons

• The tool can prove complex to set up and configure.

Pricing

AppDynamic’s pricing plan includes a 15-day free trial and a paid option. The paid option offers different packages (Infrastructure Monitoring Edition, Enterprise, Premium, Enterprise Edition for SAP Solution and Real User Monitoring).

8. Prometheus

Prometheus is a monitoring application. It utilizes an efficient time series database, flexible query language and a modern alerting approach to capture and process number-based time series data.

Unique features

• Flexible Query Language: Prometheus utilizes PromQL query language to leverage a multi-dimensional data model, which lets the user select and aggregate a range of time series data by name or value pairs.
• Stand-alone servers: The solution uses single server nodes which do not rely on remote service or network storage. You can rely on it even when other parts of your IT infrastructure develop faults.

Pros

• You can rely on the tool’’s stand-alone servers even with broken infrastructure.
• The solution integrates well with other solutions, allowing monitoring of your entire infrastructure.
• It’s an open-source solution

Cons

The learning curve for promQL is quite long, making it difficult to create custom queries and documentation for beginners.

Pricing

The solution is 100% open-source and can be downloaded as precompiled binaries.

9. Sematext

Sematext is an IT monitoring solution designed to provide log management, application performance and cloud infrastructure visibility. It’s powered with the help of metrics, logs, real user and synthetic monitoring capabilities.

Unique features

• Need-based alerts: You can set predefined conditions to direct alerts that meet certain criteria to specific agents through Slack, Teams, Email, PagerDuty, etc.
• Customizable dashboards: With the help of the events and logs metrics, you can create correlations between data to generate on-demand reports.

Pros

• Easy set-up and configuration with the help of autodiscovery and automatic service onboarding features.
• Offers over 100 integrations with popular stacks such as MongoDB
• Excellent customers support

Cons

• Limited integration with security tools

Pricing

Sematext’s pricing plan includes a 14-day free trial and a paid option. The paid option includes four different packages (Logs, Monitoring, Experience and Synthetics), billed on a subscription basis.

10. Nagios

Nagios is a log-monitoring tool designed to identify network issues caused by network connections or overloaded data links. It utilizes service logs, event logs, log files, systems and application logs to inspect and repair detected issues.

Unique features

• Extendable architecture: The solution provides seamless third-party integrations through its API
• Multi-tenant capabilities: Multiple users can access the Nagios dashboard simultaneously

Pros

• Over 1000 plugins, freely available for use with the application
• The source code is freely available, allowing for customization to suit varied business needs
• Can support 1000s of servers and hosts

Cons

• A steep learning curve due to its complex configuration of objects and servers.

Pricing

• Nagios is an open-source solution.

Key drivers for the rising demand for IT infrastructure monitoring tools

One of the key drivers is the soaring demand for advanced IT infrastructure and uptime. Most enterprise organizations are increasingly relying on digital technology, and this calls for at least 99.99 uptime. (also read our article What factors contribute to the cost of downtime)

For instance, in the healthcare industry, a system failing to provide a patient’s up-to-date data at the time of need could be life-threatening. Hence, the systems must be monitored to ensure maximum uptime at all times.

There are two more major drivers;

Increasing adoption of cloud-based IT solutions and virtualization

Most organizations are adopting these technologies, especially due to their scalability, cost-effectiveness and flexibility.

Think of a business that manages its entire supply chain via a cloud-based solution, including finance and accounting departments. With the rising cyber-attack cases, monitoring the system remains critical to ensuring business continuity.

We have a resource to help you compare the cost of cloud vs on premise. If you have already made up your mind to migrate, please adhere to these best practices for migrating to the cloud.

For more on virtualization, please refer to our comprehensive guide that covers the different types of virtualization.

Complex systems

Another reason for the rapidly growing IT infrastructure monitoring tools market is the increasing complexity of most organization’s IT infrastructure.

For instance, managing multiple inventory management systems, production lines, and supply chains in a manufacturing environment can be challenging. As such, monitoring tools help ensure the efficient working of the systems.

What determines the best infrastructure monitoring tool for your business?

A good IT infrastructure monitoring tool should offer real-time monitoring, alerting, reporting, dashboards, automated remediation and log management.

Other considerations you should make, especially with the shift towards cloud-based solutions, include multi-platform support, scalability, integration and customization.