8 Network Monitoring Tools to Know in 2025

What Are Network Monitoring Tools? 

Network monitoring tools are software solutions to oversee, analyze, and manage the performance and health of a network. These tools continuously monitor various network components, such as routers, switches, servers, and applications, to ensure they are functioning correctly. 

By tracking metrics like traffic, latency, and uptime, they help IT teams identify and address issues before they escalate into significant problems. The primary goal of network monitoring tools is to maintain the availability, reliability, and security of a network. They provide visibility into network activity, enabling organizations to detect inefficiencies, outages, or security threats. 

Additionally, these tools support capacity planning, performance optimization, and compliance with service-level agreements (SLAs). Modern network monitoring tools often integrate features like real-time analytics, AI-driven insights, and support for cloud infrastructure.

This is part of a series of articles about network security

Essential Features of Network Monitoring Tools 

A network monitoring solution should include the following capabilities.

Real-Time Performance Monitoring

Real-time performance monitoring involves tracking and analyzing data as it flows through the network, offering instant feedback on traffic, connectivity, and server load. This quick access to performance metrics enables IT teams to identify and resolve issues promptly.

With real-time monitoring, organizations can maintain optimal network performance and reduce downtime. By continuously observing network activities, IT teams can anticipate problems before they affect user experience.

Availability Monitoring

Availability monitoring focuses on ensuring that all network components are operational and accessible. It checks the uptime and health of servers, applications, and network devices, promptly alerting IT staff to any accessibility issues. This feature is vital for maintaining continuous service availability, supporting critical business processes, and upholding SLAs.

By implementing availability monitoring, organizations can reduce the risk of unexpected downtime. Continuous tracking allows for swift issue resolution, ensuring that network disruptions have minimal impact.

Traffic and Bandwidth Analysis

Traffic and bandwidth analysis provides insights into how network resources are used and identifies patterns that might indicate inefficiencies or threats. Network monitoring tools use data collection techniques to analyze traffic flow, bandwidth usage, and packet transfer rates. This analysis helps in understanding network load and congestion points, enabling administrators to optimize performance.

Efficient traffic and bandwidth analysis helps balance network resources and prevent overutilization, ensuring that critical applications receive the necessary bandwidth. By identifying traffic sources and understanding usage patterns, IT teams can make informed decisions about capacity planning and network upgrades.

Security Monitoring

Security monitoring is a vital feature that focuses on identifying and mitigating potential threats and vulnerabilities within a network. It involves tracking suspicious activities, unauthorized access attempts, and unusual data flows. Network monitoring tools use techniques like intrusion detection and behavior analysis to improve network security.

Implementing security monitoring ensures that threats are detected and addressed swiftly. This proactive stance is essential in protecting sensitive data and maintaining compliance with regulatory standards. Continuous security monitoring provides insights that help refine security policies and improve the overall security posture of the organization.

Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

Cloud infrastructure monitoring involves observing and analyzing the performance and health of cloud services and resources. This feature is increasingly important as organizations migrate to cloud-based environments. It ensures that cloud services meet performance expectations, maintaining the reliability and availability of applications hosted in the cloud.

Effective cloud monitoring helps in optimizing cloud resource utilization and managing costs. By tracking service health, latency, and user interactions, IT teams can swiftly address issues and maintain service levels.

Customizable Metrics and Dashboards

Customizable metrics and dashboards allow organizations to tailor network monitoring to their needs and objectives. Users can select relevant performance indicators and design dashboards that display critical information in an accessible format.

Tailored dashboards and metrics allow IT teams to quickly access and interpret network data, enabling faster decision-making. By customizing their monitoring environment, organizations can align monitoring efforts with business goals and operational priorities.

Related content: Read our guide to threat hunting

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you choose, deploy, and maximize the value of network monitoring tools:

1. Prioritize hybrid and multi-cloud compatibility: As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become the norm, select monitoring tools that offer seamless integration with public cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and private cloud infrastructure. This ensures visibility across diverse network layers.
2. Implement a phased deployment approach: Avoid deploying monitoring tools across the entire network at once. Instead, roll out the solution in stages—starting with critical infrastructure—to minimize disruptions and fine-tune configurations while scaling.
3. Integrate with SIEM and SOAR platforms: Connect monitoring tools with SIEM or SOAR solutions to centralize data analysis, enhance threat detection, and enable automated incident response workflows. This integration helps create a unified security ecosystem.
4. Use AI-driven anomaly detection: Leverage tools that include AI and machine learning to identify subtle deviations from normal network behavior. This approach reduces reliance on static thresholds and improves the detection of zero-day threats or slow-burn attacks.
5. Establish a baseline performance profile: Conduct a comprehensive baseline study of network performance metrics (e.g., latency, bandwidth, and throughput) during normal operations. This will help quickly identify anomalies and assess future performance improvements.

Notable Network Monitoring Tools 

1. Exabeam

Exabeam is a leading provider of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, combining UEBA, SIEM, SOAR, and TDIR to accelerate security operations. Exabeam Security Operations platform enables security teams to quickly detect, investigate, and respond to threats while enhancing operational efficiency.

Key Features:

• Exabeam customers consistently highlight how its real-time visibility, automation, and productivity tools powered by AI, uplevel security talent, transforming overwhelmed analysts into proactive defenders while reducing costs and maintaining industry-leading support. 
• Scalable log collection and management: The open platform accelerates log onboarding by 70%, eliminating the need for advanced engineering skills while ensuring seamless log aggregation across hybrid environments.
• Behavioral analytics: Uses advanced analytics to baseline normal vs. abnormal behavior, detecting insider threats, lateral movement, and advanced attacks missed by signature-based systems. Customers report that Exabeam helps detect and respond to 90% of attacks before other vendors can catch them.
• Automated threat response: Simplifies security operations by automating incident timelines, reducing manual effort by 30%, and accelerating investigation times by 80%.
• Contextual incident investigation: Since Exabeam automates timeline creation and reduces time spent on menial tasks, it cuts the time to detect and respond to threats by over 50%. Pre-built correlation rules, anomaly detection models, and vendor integrations reduce alerts by 60%, minimizing false positives.
• SaaS and cloud-native options: Flexible deployment options provide scalability for cloud-first and hybrid environments, ensuring rapid time to value for customers. For organizations who can’t, or won’t move their SIEM to the cloud, Exabeam provides a market-leading, full featured, and self-hosted SIEM.
• Network visibility with NetMon: Delivers deep insight beyond firewalls and IDS/IPS, detecting threats like data theft and botnet activity while making investigation easier with flexible searching. Deep Packet Analytics (DPA) also builds on the NetMon Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to interpret key indicators of compromise (IOCs).

2. Wireshark

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that intends to provide visibility into network activity. It targets various industries and educational institutions for analyzing network behavior and diagnosing issues. Originally launched in 1998, the Wireshark project continues to evolve with contributions from networking professionals.

License: GPL-2.0
Repository: https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark
GitHub stars: 7K+
Contributors: 1K+

Key features include:

• Display filters: Offers filtering capabilities for packet identification.
• Deep protocol inspection: Supports analysis of various protocols, with new ones continuously added.
• Live capture and offline analysis: Captures network traffic and allows for post-capture analysis.
• Cross-platform compatibility: Runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.
• Three-pane packet browser: Provides an interface for analyzing network packets.

3. Datadog Network Monitoring

Datadog Network Monitoring is a solution aiming to unify visibility across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. It provides correlation between network traffic, applications, devices, and infrastructure, enabling IT teams to identify and resolve performance issues.

License: Commercial

Key features include:

• Unified visibility across environments: Offers monitoring across cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premises infrastructures, including containers, serverless environments, and virtual machines.
• Cloud network monitoring: Provides insight into traffic between microservices, monitors connectivity across cloud and on-premises endpoints, and helps correlate application, network, and infrastructure data.
• Network device monitoring: Unifies metrics for physical and virtual devices, offering wide area network (WAN) and hybrid network visibility across various vendors.
• Traffic path analysis: Tracks traffic flow between applications, hopefully pinpointing latency, packet loss, and intermediate hop performance to accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Service-to-service interaction monitoring: Tracks interactions between services, pods, clusters, or hosts to potentially identify bottlenecks and monitor connectivity between applications.

4. Nagios Network Analyzer

Nagios Network Analyzer is a solution for network traffic analysis, offering insights into NetFlow and sFlow data to help improve network visibility and security. With its alerting and reporting features, the tool is intended to help IT teams track bandwidth usage, detect anomalies, and address network issues. It integrates with Nagios XI for a unified network monitoring experience.

License: Commercial, based on Nagios Core which is licensed as GPL-2.0

Key features include:

• Dashboards: Provides a high-level overview of network sources, flow data, checks, and more through an interface.
• NetFlow and sFlow analysis: Delivers packet-level data for tracking bandwidth utilization and traffic patterns.
• Bandwidth utilization calculator: Customizable to generate reports on bandwidth usage by source, IP, or other metrics.
• Automated alert system: Sends notifications when bandwidth thresholds are breached or suspicious activity is detected, hopefully ensuring timely response to issues.
• Advanced visualizations: Offers insights into network health with visual representations of traffic, bandwidth, and anomalies.

5. Zabbix Network Monitoring

Zabbix Network Monitoring is a solution to collect, analyze, and act on network traffic and hardware metrics. It supports monitoring of a range of network devices and resources using SNMP, Zabbix agents, or other data collection methods. With features like alerting, data aggregation, and dynamic discovery, it aims to help IT teams maintain network infrastructure.

License: AGPL-3.0
Repository: https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix
GitHub stars: 4K+
Contributors: 30+

Key features include:

• Network metrics collection: Monitors incoming and outgoing traffic, bandwidth usage, packet loss, interface error rates, TCP connections, and link status. Supports SNMP versions v1, v2c, and v3.
• Network device health monitoring: Tracks device uptime, CPU and memory usage, power supply status, temperature sensors, fan states, and other metrics intended for maintaining hardware performance.
• Alerting system: Offers problem thresholds to potentially detect network spikes, packet loss, or errors. Includes features like alert suppression during maintenance, root-cause notifications, dynamic anomaly detection, and escalation workflows to notify relevant users or departments.
• Data transformation and validation: Normalizes and validates collected data, transforms counter metrics into per-second values, and extracts data from structured formats like JSON and XML.
• Aggregated and calculated statistics: Aggregates metrics across time periods to provide insights such as minimum, maximum, and average traffic values. Enables calculations for total traffic per tenant, multiple network interfaces, or error message counts.

6. SolarWinds Network Monitoring

SolarWinds Network Monitoring is a solution to provide visibility into network health, performance, and availability. It aims to simplify network management for hybrid, cloud-native, and on-premises environments through automated discovery, customizable topology mapping, and performance metrics. Its alerting and troubleshooting features are supported by AIOps.

License: Commercial

Key features include:

• Automated network discovery: Identifies devices across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-native environments using protocols like ICMP, SNMP, WMI, CDP, VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Customizable multi-level topology maps: Automatically generates network maps for wired and wireless devices from vendors such as Cisco, Dell, HP, Juniper, and F5.
• Critical performance metric monitoring: Provides monitoring of network metrics, including bandwidth, packet loss, throughput, latency, connectivity, and availability, to maintain network health.
• AIOps-powered alerts and insights: Intended to reduce alert fatigue and improve troubleshooting by detecting root causes faster and delivering insights.
• Bandwidth analysis: Helps identify bandwidth bottlenecks and resource-hungry devices, potentially helping IT teams optimize network performance.

7. Site24x7 Network Monitoring

Site24x7 Network Monitoring is a cloud-based solution aiming to provide visibility into network performance and health at the device and interface levels. Built on ManageEngine OpManager, Site24x7 offers capabilities for monitoring network traffic, fault detection, and configuration management. It supports multi-vendor environments and provides insights to help ensure uptime, and secure network infrastructure.

License: Commercial

Key features include:

• Traffic monitoring: Tracks in-and-out traffic, packets, errors, and discards while analyzing performance metrics to pinpoint bottlenecks and help optimize bandwidth.
• Multi-vendor support: Monitors devices from various vendors, including Cisco, HP, Dell, Juniper, Canon, and D-Link. Supports custom device monitoring by adding sysOIDs and custom MIBs.
• Auto-discovery of devices: Automatically discovers network devices within a specified IP range or network, designed for quick setup for LAN and WAN environments.
• Customizable device templates: Supports over 11,000 device types and simplifies categorization and auto-association for potentially easier management.
• Network mapping: Automates the discovery and mapping of network infrastructure with Layer 2 topology maps.

8. PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor, developed by Paessler, is an on-premises network monitoring solution that aims to provide visibility into IT, OT, and IoT infrastructures. It allows organizations to monitor systems, devices, and traffic through a single platform. PRTG supports network discovery and customizable dashboards, and is suited for small to medium-sized environments.

License: Commercial

Key features include:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Monitors IT, OT, and IoT systems, devices, and traffic, intending to avoid vendor lock-in.
• Integrated technology support: Supports protocols and technologies such as SNMP, WMI, SSH, NetFlow, and sFlow, to cover a range of monitoring needs.
• Automatic network discovery: Attempts easier setup by automatically discovering devices and generating initial monitoring configurations.
• Custom maps and dashboards: Provides a centralized view of the infrastructure through customizable maps and dashboards, enabling insights into network performance.
• Alerts and notifications: Sends notifications via email, push, or other channels for faster incident response. Alerts are customizable to meet niche needs.

How to Choose the Right Network Monitoring Tool 

Here are some of the main factors to consider when evaluating network monitoring solutions.

Scalability Considerations

As organizations grow, their networks become more complex, requiring tools that can handle increased data volume and network intricacy. A scalable monitoring solution can accommodate additional devices, users, and workloads without sacrificing performance or accuracy.

Selecting a tool with scalability options allows organizations to adapt to changing network demands. Tools that offer horizontal and vertical scaling mechanisms ensure a seamless monitoring experience during network growth.

Integration Capabilities

Modern IT environments often involve diverse technologies and systems. A tool that integrates well with other applications and platforms can provide a comprehensive view of network health and performance. This integration allows for automated workflows and data sharing.

By choosing monitoring tools with strong integration features, organizations can simplify IT operations and reduce manual efforts. Integrated systems enable centralized monitoring and management, offering a unified platform for all network activities.

User Interface and Ease of Use

A network monitoring tool’s user interface (UI) significantly impacts its usability and effectiveness. A well-designed UI enables IT staff to easily navigate the tool, set configurations, and interpret data. Ease of use ensures that teams can quickly respond to issues and make informed decisions based on clear visualizations of network performance.

Choosing a tool with an intuitive interface reduces the learning curve and boosts productivity. User-friendly features, such as drag-and-drop dashboards and automated reporting, improve user adoption and efficiency.

Cost and Licensing Models

Organizations need to consider initial costs, ongoing fees, and the potential for hidden charges. Licensing models vary, including subscription-based, perpetual, or freemium options, each with its own cost implications and benefits depending on the organization’s budget and needs.

Evaluating the total cost of ownership helps organizations balance budget constraints with functionality requirements. Understanding the licensing terms and future scalability costs ensures that the investment supports both current needs and future growth.

Conclusion

Network monitoring tools are essential for maintaining the performance, reliability, and security of modern networks. By selecting a solution that aligns with an organization’s specific needs—considering factors such as scalability, integration, usability, and cost—IT teams can ensure optimal network operations and proactively address issues. Investing in the right monitoring tool not only improves network health but also supports business continuity and operational efficiency.