Open-source software is easy and quick to download but it requires investing time and resources for any missing functionalities. This may sometimes require support from community or IT teams within to enhance.

If used for official purposes, be cautioned to get approval from your organization security team as most of the organizations especially financial institutes prefer the usage of licensed software’s.

Here we will outline top 5 open source network monitoring software available in market.

Nagios core

This is one of the most popular open source network monitoring software for its capability to enhance the functionalities by creating custom plug in’s using Perl or shell scripting. Using those customized scripts, we can derive metrics from any of the hard devices in the network. It also provides features such as notification, auto discovery, extended graphing and much more.

Cacti

This another competitive tool that’s in market to extract data from any of the devices, firewalls, routers, switches and represent back in graphical interface. Cacti utilizes the RRDTool to store the data and represent in graphical format. This tool is well known for lifelong data storage with a limitation on storage size. This tool will allow to add users and provide permissions to edit and apply restrictions if required. It’s also ideal for organizations and working in teams for sharing data.

Zabbix

It’s another most commonly used tool after Nagios. Its easy accessible GUI console will let users get hang off the tool on usage. It’s an agentless tool leveraging the technologies SNMP, ICMP, Telnet etc. This tool as well provides capability to customize using scripts via Shell or Perl scripting.

Ntopng

This tool provides network traffic visibility to a very large extent. Using this tool as a free source has some limitations but the level of reporting on network traffic that it provides is worth the effort. It can analyse the data with a 10GB speed and report a detailed information on network traffic. Open source version of tool is good enough to get the network insight. This can also be integrated with external tools like Nagios for alerting and providing data for monitoring.

Spiceworks

This tool will provide many other functionalities than the network monitoring like inventory management, helpdesk workflow, cloud monitoring. This as well is an agentless tool leveraging SNMP and WMI technologies for network reporting purposes. This can also provide deep dive into many network performance issues. It can also provide the capability on customizing restart from within and outside the app.

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