20+ Awesome Opensource and Free Monitoring Tools

A curated list of 20+ dynamic, open-source, and free monitoring tools ranked by popularity, each with distinctive capabilities for various IT needs.

Prometheus

Prometheus offers time-series data collection, alerting, a flexible querying language called PromQL, a multi-dimensional data model, and scalability. It is well-suited for dynamic environments and cloud-native architectures.

Grafana

Grafana specializes in data visualization and dashboarding. It supports multiple data sources including Prometheus, Graphite, Elasticsearch, and others. Grafana’s strength lies in its ability to create visually appealing dashboards for monitoring and analysis.

Nagios

Nagios is a robust monitoring tool capable of monitoring servers, applications, services, and network protocols. It provides alerting via email, SMS, or custom scripts. Nagios is known for its extensive plugin ecosystem and flexibility, although it can be complex to configure.

Zabbix

Zabbix offers both agent-based and agentless monitoring, auto-discovery, flexible alerting, and capacity planning. It provides a user-friendly interface and is simpler to set up compared to Nagios.

Icinga

Icinga is a fork of Nagios with modernized features. It provides monitoring of hosts and services, extensibility through plugins, and support for distributed monitoring. Icinga is known for its flexibility and improved architecture.

Sensu

Sensu is designed for cloud-scale monitoring and offers monitoring and metric collection, dynamic discovery, and integration with various data sources and notification tools. It is highly extensible and customizable.

OpenNMS

OpenNMS is a comprehensive network monitoring tool offering event and alarm management, performance measurement, and fault management. It is suitable for large-scale network monitoring and management.

Cacti

Cacti specializes in SNMP-based monitoring, graphing, data collection, templating, and customization. It is easy to use and ideal for monitoring network devices via SNMP.

Munin

Munin provides resource monitoring, graphing, a plugin architecture, and easy installation and configuration. It is lightweight and suitable for basic monitoring needs.

Netdata

Netdata offers real-time performance monitoring with visualizations, per-second granularity, and no external dependencies. It provides detailed insights into system performance and is ideal for real-time monitoring requirements.

Graylog

Log management, log analysis, and real-time monitoring. It offers centralized log collection, search capabilities, and alerting.

ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)

ELK Stack is a combination of three open-source tools: Elasticsearch (for search and analytics), Logstash (for log ingestion and processing), and Kibana (for data visualization and dashboarding). It’s commonly used for log analysis and monitoring.

Observium

Network observation and monitoring tool primarily focused on SNMP-based monitoring. It provides automatic discovery, intuitive dashboards, and detailed network insights.

Shinken

Shinken is a monitoring framework compatible with Nagios configuration and plugins. It offers scalability, high availability, and a more modern architecture.

Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems. It focuses on performance monitoring and offers visualizations for clusters and grids.

Collectd

Collectd is a daemon that collects system and application performance metrics periodically. It can send the collected data to various destinations and is often used in conjunction with visualization tools like Grafana.

Zenoss

Zenoss is an enterprise-grade monitoring platform offering network, server, and application monitoring. It provides event correlation, performance analytics, and automated remediation.

Cabot

Features: Cabot is an open-source, self-hosted monitoring and alerting service. It provides monitoring of services, periodic checks, and alerting via email, HipChat, Slack, or other notification channels.

Prometheus Alertmanager

Features: Prometheus Alertmanager manages alerts sent by the Prometheus monitoring system. It handles deduplication, grouping, and routing of alerts to various notification channels.

TICK Stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor)

The TICK Stack is composed of Telegraf (for metrics collection), InfluxDB (for storing time-series data), Chronograf (for visualization), and Kapacitor (for alerting and anomaly detection). It’s suitable for real-time monitoring and analytics.