The IT infrastructure is failing less thanks to modern systems like automated replication and self-healing systems. But still, IT systems can occasionally fail. 

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And when they do, the costs are huge. Expenses associated with over two-thirds of all outages are exceeding $1,00,000.

Given the increasing financial stake, selecting the best infrastructure monitoring tools is critical.

Edge Delta: Best for Streamlined, AI-Enhanced Monitoring and Troubleshooting in Data-Intensive Kubernetes Environments​

Rating on Capterra: 4.7-Stars

Year Founded: 2018

Founder/s: Ozan Unlu and Fatih Yildiz

No. of Employees: 51-200

Pricing: $0.12 to $0.20 per GB

Free Trial: 7 days

Edge Delta's infrastructure monitoring excels with its flexible, AI-driven log analysis and user-friendly deployment. Its strengths lie in providing advanced insights and ease of use.

With a focus on automated observability and AI-driven anomaly detection, streamlining service monitoring, and troubleshooting without complex configurations, Edge Delta's infrastructure monitoring solution represents a forward-thinking approach to log management and analytics. It promises scalability, efficiency, and security to meet the evolving needs of modern enterprises.

Key features include:

  • AI/ML Anomaly Detection automatically identifies anomalies, eliminating the need for manual threshold settings or predictive monitoring​​.
  • Automated Troubleshooting: Summarises log data to simplify identifying changes and affected resources​​.
  • Petabyte-Scale Log Search: Offers cost-effective storage and search capabilities for large-scale data without data sampling or filtering​​.
  • Kubernetes Metrics Integration: This tool supports the automatic capture of critical Kubernetes metrics, facilitating faster troubleshooting by correlating metrics with logs​​.
  • Scale and Performance: Capable of ingesting millions of log lines per second and querying petabyte-scale datasets efficiently​​.
  • Data Control and Security: Provides tools for data shaping, enrichment, and security, including RBAC controls and data masking​​.

Data Dog: Best for Unmatched Breadth of Coverage                                                                                                                                     

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Stars

Year Founded: 2010

Founder/s: Alexis Le-Quoc and Olivier Pomel

No. of Employees: 5,200

Pricing: Paid version starts $15 per month

Free Trial: 14 Days + Free Version

Datadog's infrastructure monitoring solution provides extensive visibility into infrastructure performance and security with its metrics, visualisations, and alerts for infrastructure monitoring via SaaS. It caters to any stack, including on-premise, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud environments.

It simplifies deployment and management with an intuitive interface without the need for extensive training or professional services.

The platform enables deep visibility into infrastructure health by tracking thousands of metrics and facilitating the correlation of related data points across the stack. Datadog combines monitoring with robust security features as a unified platform, offering continuous configuration checks, compliance tracking, and vulnerability prioritisation.

Its advanced capabilities, such as accurate global percentiles and the integration of custom business metrics, make Datadog a comprehensive and efficient choice for optimising and securing cloud or hybrid environments.

Dynatrace: Best for Support of All Types of Cloud Environments

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Stars

Year Founded: 2005

Founder/s: Bernd Greifeneder, Sok-Kheng Taing and Hubert Gerstmayr

No. of Employees: 4,180

Pricing: $.08 per hour for 8 GB

Free Trial: 15 Days, no credit card required

Dynatrace infrastructure monitoring offers a robust solution for automatic, AI-assisted observability across cloud and hybrid environments. It is excellent for real time alerts and dedicated support. It also seamlessly auto-discovers hosts, VMs, cloud services, and logs, ensuring comprehensive monitoring.

It is built on the principles of continuous automation and facilitates cross-team collaboration. It integrates user experience and business analytics into its monitoring capabilities.

Dynatrace addresses performance issues and challenges such as application downtime, slow performance, and infrastructure inefficiencies.

Key features:

  • Automatic monitoring of diverse infrastructure elements such as cloud, hybrid systems, servers, storage, and VMs
  • Provides advanced observability for PaaS and container technologies
  • Simplifies incident management by integrating with ITSM solutions

4.  Nagios: Best for Flexibility and Ability to be Customised and Extended

Rating on Capterra:  4.1-Stars

Year Founded: 2007

Founder/s: Ethan Galstad

No. of Employees: 68

Pricing: Free (Nagios core)

Alt tag: Nagios Homepage

Nagios is a go-to open-source tool for monitoring IT infrastructure, such as servers, networks, and applications. It gives real time updates, sends alerts, and churns reports to help admins fix issues before they become bigger problems.

Its customisation options, easy-to-use web interface, and robust alerting make Nagios a compelling monitoring tool for organisations that value flexibility and extensibility.

Its plugin system lets it monitor pretty much anything—from how much memory you're using to the temperature in your server room. Nagio's extensive library of plugins, many of which are community-developed, helps you monitor almost anything you can think of.

Nagios is notable for its flexibility and the ability to be customised and extended. It allows users to tailor monitoring checks and strategies to their needs. 

The alert system in Nagios is designed to notify administrators via email or SMS when something goes wrong, allowing for swift action. Combining it with a comprehensive web-based user interface simplifies configuration and management and makes monitoring data actionable.

5. New Relic: Best for User-Friendly Interface

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Stars

Year Founded: 2008

Founder/s: Lew Cirne

No. of Employees: 2,700

Pricing: Basic is free. Standard starts at $.30/GB beyond free 100 GB limit

Alt tag: New Relic Homepage

New Relic provides a sophisticated platform for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting across cloud and on-premises infrastructures. It enables quick identification, assessment, and resolution of issues before they escalate. New Relic's easy setup, powerful visualisation, and customisable metrics put it among the top infrastructure monitoring tools.

It offers unified visibility, allowing users to see their entire infrastructure and application performance in one place. It facilitates the detection of emerging issues in real time without pre-configured alerts.

With proactive monitoring, New Relic acts as an early warning system, detecting changes and assessing system health in real time. Its system-wide topology feature enables users to do the following:

  • Visualise relationships and dependencies
  • Isolate problem sources
  • Time travel to incident origins for a quicker resolution

New Relic makes root-cause analysis easy by providing logs and performance comparisons for related entities, alerts, events, and network metrics. Its comprehensive approach boosts performance by linking infrastructure health with application efficiency, simplifying troubleshooting for a smoother operational flow.

6. Checkmk: Best for Getting Visibility for Complex Infrastructure

Checkmk is available as an open-source raw edition and as an enterprise edition with many additional enterprise features.

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Stars

Year Founded: 2007

Founder/s: Mathias Kettner

No. of Employees: more than 150

Pricing: Raw edition is free

Enterprise edition starts €65

Alt tag: Checkmk Homepage

Checkmk is one of the best IT monitoring platforms, with its long list of features for comprehensive monitoring of complex IT infrastructures, scalable automation capabilities, ease of setup, automatic graph generation, and extensive customisation options.

It enables system administrators, IT managers, and DevOps teams to identify issues across the entire IT infrastructure. It monitors your entire IT infrastructure, including cloud services, data centers, servers, networks, and containers.

The tool is known for its scalability, automation, and ability to extend its capabilities, making it ideal for managing complex IT environments efficiently. Checkmk's library of over 2,000 monitoring plugins facilitates immediate monitoring capabilities for many IT components. Its automation features streamline monitoring tasks, and its scalable architecture can handle monitoring on a global scale.

Moreover, Checkmk is customisable, allowing users to adjust its open-source code or develop new plugins using the Check-API.

7. Splunk: Best for Real-Time Hardware Monitoring for Anomalies

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Stars

Year Founded: 2003

Founder/s: Michael Baum, Erik Swan, Rob Das, Robin K Das

No. of Employees: 7,500+

Pricing: Starts at $15

Free Trial: 14 days

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring offers real time monitoring and troubleshooting across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud setups. It integrates with over 250 cloud services and provides immediate visualisation through pre-built dashboards. This extensive integration and auto-discovery feature provide comprehensive visibility, ensuring no component is overlooked.

Designed for proactive problem-solving, Splunk delivers real time alerts based on dynamic thresholds and complex rules to address issues before they impact user experience. This significantly reduces Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), boosting operational efficiency. Centralised controls support the monitoring of service-level objectives and custom business metrics, complemented by visibility that aids in troubleshooting.

Splunk also features advanced monitoring capabilities, including real time analytics and API management, which enhance development and operational workflows. It offers Kubernetes monitoring, predictive analytics, and network tools for quick issue identification and resolution. Splunk's suite of features provides detailed insights and proactive capabilities, making it a solution for modern monitoring needs.

8. Zabbix: Best for Flexible and Extendable Data Gathering

Rating on Capterra:  4.7-Star

Year Founded: 2005

Founder/s: Alexei Vladishev

No. of Employees: 126

Pricing: Free

Zabbix is an open-source platform that monitors networks, applications, and IT infrastructure. It excels at integrating with various systems, provides detailed visualisations and customisable alerts for efficient issue management, and includes advanced features like synthetic and IoT monitoring capabilities.

By collecting and analysing performance metrics, Zabbix provides insightful visualisations and timely alerts for detected issues, ensuring swift response times.

It integrates with nearly any system or cloud service through native Zabbix agents and agentless methods. Zabbix efficiently manages incident notifications, offering customisable alerts through email, SMS, and Jabber.

Zabbix's advanced escalation module lets you create complex workflows to send critical alerts to the right people, making it an all-in-one IT infrastructure monitoring tool.

9. Better Stack: Best for Uptime Monitoring

Rating on Capterra:  4.9-Star

Year Founded: 2021

Founder/s: Juraj Masar, Veronika Kolejak

No. of Employees: 29

Pricing: Basic is free; paid subscriptions start at $25/month

Better Stack is a powerful log management and infrastructure monitoring tool with fast processing capabilities for large data volumes and is designed for cloud infrastructures of size. It collects, analyses, visualises, and archives logs across your cloud infrastructure.

It has uptime monitoring, giving the fastest 30-second checks with a screenshot of the error and a second-by-second timeline. Better Stack offers seamless integration with widely-used technology stacks to enhance monitoring capabilities, including:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Kubernetes
  • Heroku
  • Docker

Better Stack provides customisable dashboards for clear data visualisation and employs strict security practices to protect data. It is notable for its collaboration features, which support real time teamwork and include anomaly detection alerts for quick issue resolution.

10. Grafana: Best for Data Visualisation Capabilities

Rating on Capterra:  4.6-Star

Year Founded: 2013

Founder/s: Raj Dutt, Torkel Ödegaard, Anthony Woods

No. of Employees: more than 900

Pricing: Free and paid plan starts $8 per 1k metrics billable series

Grafana is renowned for its clean and elegant data visualisation capabilities, designed to minimise distractions and simplify the process of data analysis. Its effectiveness is underscored by its use in SpaceX launches, highlighting its reliability and performance in critical applications.

The platform offers a comprehensive suite of features tailored to various use cases. Users can create dynamic and adaptable dashboards, enabling effective visualization and analysis of data from multiple sources. Grafana's annotation features come in handy for correlating data, allowing users to mark graphs with events or fetched data to help identify the causes of issues.

One of Grafana's strengths is its ability to integrate with many tools and data visualisations through custom plugins. This includes enterprise-level plugins for enhanced monitoring solutions, broadening its applicability across different environments. The platform's alerting system provides flexible notification options, while its permissions and teams feature facilitates the management of dashboards and data sources across organisational groups. Support for SQL data sources and the capability to monitor Prometheus underscore its versatility and self-awareness.

Grafana ensures secure and controlled access through robust authentication methods, including advanced team mapping features available in Grafana Enterprise. This enterprise version builds on the open-source base by adding exclusive data source plugins, additional features, and professional support, catering to businesses that require advanced options such as improved authentication, role-based access control, and specific data permissions.

How To Choose The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tool

When choosing an infrastructure monitoring tool, there are some features that you must take into account. Consider tools with the following features:

Comprehensive Monitoring Capabilities

Look for tools that can monitor various components of your infrastructure, including servers, networks, applications, and cloud services. It should cover both physical and virtual environments.

Real-time Monitoring and Alerting

A good infrastructure monitoring tool gives you real time visibility into your infrastructure's health, performance, and availability. Customisable alerting mechanisms notify you immediately when performance metrics exceed thresholds.

Dashboard and Visualisation

Infrastructure monitoring tools should include a user-friendly, customisable dashboard with a unified view of your infrastructure's health and performance. These visualisations can help you quickly understand complex data.

Root Cause Analysis

Look for tools with features that help you identify and diagnose the root causes of performance issues or outages, including automated root cause analysis capabilities.

Scalability

The tool should be scalable to accommodate your infrastructure's growth and the increasing volume of monitoring data.

Integration Capabilities

Find out if the infrastructure monitoring tools can integrate with other tools and platforms in your IT ecosystem. Check to see if they integrate with incident management systems, automation tools, cloud platforms, and more.

Customisable Alerts

Infrastructure monitoring tools typically notify you when a key metric exceeds or falls below a predetermined threshold. Some tools allow you to set up proactive, machine learning-based alerts to tell the right teams when a host or container's error rate or latency rises.

Up to Date Reporting and Analytics

Choose a tool with detailed reporting and analytics capabilities. It should also be able to store historical performance data for trend analysis and capacity planning.

Security and Compliance

Security is an important consideration when selecting an infrastructure monitoring tool. You need a tool to protect your infrastructure from cyber threats while ensuring your data's confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Ease of Use

The tool should have an easy interface that allows administrators to quickly access and view relevant information, set alerts, and run reports. Ease of use enables your team to be on top of the situation and make informed decisions swiftly and efficiently.

Cost-effectiveness

Choose a tool that provides a good balance of price and functionality and does not use observability price-trapping tricks. Tools that are too expensive may be unsuitable for your business, while tools that are too cheap may lack the functionality and features you need.

Support

Consider a tool that provides reliable and timely support if you encounter any issues or problems with your monitoring. When evaluating the support system options of infrastructure monitoring tools, take note of the following:

  • Available support options
  • Response times for support requests
  • Support quality based on user reviews and feedback

 

 

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