BEST FREE NETWORK MONITORING SOFTWARE

What is exactly a network monitoring software? These type of software helps in supervising the overall process which occurs in a system and provides reports to the system or network administrator. Network monitoring software monitors and manages the network traffic flow over a network. It is mainly used by network administrators and security staff to monitor the operations of a system. The network monitoring software monitors a network's:

• Uptime
• Availability
• Response time

It also monitors the system, look for unusual activity and alert the network administrator when something suspicious or malicious is detected over the network. The monitoring process can be for a physical/wireless LAN, WAN or both. Network monitoring software provides information such as:

• Active devices and equipment on a network
• IP addressing scheme.

Hence in this article, we have listed some of the best free network monitoring software in 2018.

Best Network Monitoring Software 2018

Microsoft Network Monitor

Microsoft Network Monitor captures, view and analyze network traffic. This tool works best for troubleshooting network problems and applications on the network. The updated version is called Microsoft Message Analyzer.

• Supports the latest protocol parsers to capture, display, and analyze the protocol messaging traffic, events and other system or application messages in troubleshooting and diagnostic scenarios.
• A powerful tool for capturing and analyzing protocol messages.
• Allows you to load, aggregate, and analyze data from a log and saved trace files.

Nagios Core

Nagios Core is a free network monitoring software, serves as the basic event scheduler, event processor, and alert manager for elements that are monitored. Let’s look at its features:

• Monitors applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics and infrastructure components with a single tool.
• Trending and capacity planning add-ons.
• Possess escalation capabilities that make sure the alert notifications reach to the right people.

Advanced IP Scanner

Advanced IP Scanner is another free tool for network monitoring and the best part is, it doesn’t require installation. Let’s look at its features:

• A reliable network scanner to analyze LAN and exports the scan results to CSV.
• The software shows all network devices, gives you access to shared folders, provides remote control of computers (via RDP and Radmin).
• Remotely switch the computers off.

OpenNMS

OpenNMS is a freeware and one of the best monitoring software available in 2017.Let’s look at the features:

• Offers event and notification management, discovery and provisioning, service monitoring, and data collection.
• Provides path outage support and automatic acknowledgment of self-clearing problems
• OpenNMS includes a client app for the iOS which gives you the ability to view outages, nodes, alarms.

Zabbix

Zabbix is an open-source networking tool which also serves as a freeware which enables you to monitor millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices at real-time.

• It is very difficult to setup but very easy to manage due to its clear and clutter-free interface.
• Supports a number of databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle and IBM DB2.
• Hasmonitoring capabilities allow you to customize using any scripting or programming language.

Cacti

Cacti enables you to collect data from any network element that includes routing and switching systems, firewalls, load balancers, and servers, and represent data into robust graphs. Let’s look at the features of the same:

• Contains a “data input” mechanism which defines custom scripts that can be used to gather data.
• Enables the tree view which allows users to create “graph hierarchies” and place graphs on the tree making it easy to organize a large number of graphs.
• User-based management which allows the administrators to create users and assign different levels of permissions to the cacti interface.

Capsa Free

Capsa Free, is a free network analyzer that allows you to monitor network traffic, troubleshoot network issues and analyze packets.

• Gives support for over 300 network protocols.
• Accurately detects DoS (DDoS) attack, Worm activity, ARP attack, TCP port scanning and suspicious conversation and locates the source and target in real-time.
• Captures all network packets transmitted on the network and displays detailed packet decoding information in Hex, ASCII, and EBCDIC.

Wireshark

• Inspects hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time.
• Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and NetBSD.
• Helps in Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP and WPA/WPA2

NTOP

NTOP is now called as NTOPNG (NTOP of new generation). It is a network traffic probe that monitors network usage.

• Creates a NetFlow-sFlow emitter-collector, a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) based client interface for creating ntop-centric monitoring applications and RRDtool (RRD) for storing traffic statistics.
• Analyzes traffic even at 10G speed. It also reports on IP addresses, volume, and bytes for each transaction.
• Integrates with external monitoring applications such as Nagios for alerting, and provide data for monitoring.

NMAP

NMAP (Network Mapper) is one of the best open source and free network monitoring software used for network discovery and security auditing.

• Supports many advanced techniques for mapping out networks filled with IP filters, firewalls, routers, and other obstacles.
• Works well in Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, Mac OS X, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS and Amiga