Best Network Monitoring Tools in 2026

PRTG is developed by Paessler GmbH of Nuremberg, Germany. It monitors systems, devices, traffic and applications through "sensors", each of which measures one value such as an interface's bandwidth, a device's CPU load or a URL's response time; custom thresholds trigger alerts, and the HTTP API and custom sensors extend coverage. SNMP is the main protocol for network devices, and flow-based traffic analysis is available.

The product family includes PRTG Network Monitor for self-hosted use, PRTG Enterprise Monitor for large environments and PRTG Hosted Monitor as a SaaS option. Paessler recommends Enterprise Monitor for more than 1,000 devices.

PRTG's licensing by sensor count is straightforward to understand, with subscriptions from PRTG 500 at US$200 per month billed annually (about 50 devices) to PRTG 10000 at US$1,642 per month (about 1,000 devices). A Freeware Edition covers up to 100 sensors (about 10 devices), and a 30-day trial has no sensor limits. Because each monitored value consumes a sensor, detailed monitoring of many interfaces can exhaust a licence faster than device counts suggest. Enterprise Monitor pricing is not published.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) tracks availability, performance and device health across multi-vendor networks from one console. It automatically discovers routers, switches, firewalls and wireless controllers, and monitors response time, packet loss, bandwidth utilisation and hardware health such as temperature and fan speed. Distinctive features include NetPath hop-by-hop path analysis, PerfStack for overlaying metrics on a shared timeline, Wi-Fi heat maps for Cisco access points, alerts with dynamic baselines and capacity forecasting.

NPM is an Orion module for on-premises and hybrid environments, and its features are also included in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, which SolarWinds recommends for expanded cloud monitoring; SolarWinds Observability SaaS is sold separately. SolarWinds itself was taken private by Turn/River Capital in April 2025 in a transaction valued at about US$4.4 billion.

NPM has no published price; buyers request a quote. A fully functional 30-day trial is available. As a self-hosted product, it requires customers to run and maintain the monitoring servers, unlike SaaS tools.

OpManager is ManageEngine's network and server monitoring product, sold for more than 15 years. It monitors routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, virtual machines, printers and storage devices, including Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix, Xen and Nutanix environments, Fibre Channel switches and tape libraries. WAN link monitoring uses Cisco IP SLA, and the product can discover and monitor Cisco ACI fabrics. Visualisation includes Layer 2 maps, business views and 3D floor and rack views, with more than 200 dashboard widgets.

The licence is device-based, so any number of interfaces, volumes and sensors can be monitored on a licensed device. Starting prices are listed as US$245 for 25 devices for Standard, US$345 for 25 devices for Professional (which adds virtual server monitoring, network path analysis and workflow automation) and US$4,595 for 250 devices for Enterprise, which adds distributed monitoring with remote probes and high availability. Purchases can be annual subscriptions or perpetual licences.

Many capabilities, such as flow analysis and configuration management, are add-ons; ManageEngine sells them in an OpManager Nexus bundle that it says costs up to 40% less than buying them separately. A 30-day trial is available.

Datadog, a Nasdaq-listed observability company based in New York, reported revenue of US$3.43 billion for 2025, up from US$2.68 billion in 2024. Its network monitoring portfolio has several parts. Cloud Network Monitoring maps traffic between microservices and between cloud and on-premises endpoints, visualises hop-by-hop paths with latency and packet loss, identifies top talkers for cost optimisation and flags DNS traffic to suspicious domains. Network Device Monitoring covers physical and virtual devices from Cisco, Meraki, Juniper, F5, Arista, Aruba and others via SNMP, traps, APIs, NetFlow and syslog, with auto-discovery, topology maps, anomaly detection and bandwidth forecasting. NetFlow monitoring supports NetFlow v5 and v9, IPFIX, sFlow and jFlow.

Datadog's strength is correlation: network metrics sit next to host, application and log data in the same SaaS platform, so engineers can trace a slow service to a congested interface.

Pricing is modular: Cloud Network Monitoring costs US$5 per host per month billed annually and Network Device Monitoring US$7 per device per month, with higher month-to-month and on-demand rates; these usually sit on top of Infrastructure Pro at US$15 per host per month annually. Costs can therefore escalate as more products and hosts are added.

LogicMonitor provides SaaS-based monitoring for networks, servers, cloud and applications, with collectors installed on-premises to gather data from local devices and send it to the cloud platform. Its licensing unit spans both on-premises resources and cloud instances, which suits hybrid estates.

LogicMonitor publishes starting list prices for three platform packages, priced per Hybrid Unit per month: Essentials US$19, Advanced US$37 and Signature US$50. One Hybrid Unit equals one collector-monitored on-premises resource or one cloud IaaS instance, seven PaaS resources or five wireless access points, so at Essentials pricing a wireless access point costs about US$3.80 a month. Prices are starting list prices for standard minimum quantities and terms, and actual pricing varies with volume and contract.

Any plan can be trialled free for 14 days. Compared with self-hosted tools such as PRTG or OpManager, LogicMonitor removes server administration, but per-resource costs are higher, and the pricing page does not state billing frequency.

Auvik is a cloud-based network management platform that automatically discovers devices, builds an inventory and documentation, and draws live topology maps that update as the network changes. The company says it supports more than 700 device vendors out of the box, that most networks become fully visible in under an hour, and that more than 80,000 IT professionals and MSPs use it.

Beyond monitoring and more than 64 pre-configured alerts, Auvik keeps a version history of device configurations for comparison and recovery, offers NetFlow-based traffic analysis, flags ageing hardware and CVEs, and adds AI-assisted troubleshooting that suggests likely root causes. Integrations with ConnectWise, ServiceNow, Slack and Microsoft Teams, plus APIs for alerts, inventory and tenants, make it a common choice for managed service providers running multi-tenant environments.

Auvik does not publish prices; its pricing page asks visitors to request a quote, and a 14-day free trial is available without a credit card. Its focus is network infrastructure, so server and application monitoring are less extensive than in all-in-one tools such as PRTG or LogicMonitor.

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform for networks, servers, cloud services and applications. Since version 7.0 it has been licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3; versions up to 6.4 used GPLv2. The software is free to use, modify and distribute, and Zabbix asks, but does not require, commercial users to support development by buying technical support.

Zabbix monitors devices both with its own agents and agentlessly over network protocols such as SNMP, using templates and trigger expressions for alerting. Its flexibility is a strength for experienced teams and a challenge for newcomers, since templates, triggers and dashboards require configuration.

For organisations that do not want to host the platform, Zabbix Cloud is priced by new values per second (NVPS): Nano (50 NVPS) starts at US$50 per month, Medium (1,000 NVPS) at US$750 and 2xLarge (10,000 NVPS) at US$5,000, with 10% off for annual billing and 10 GB of storage included in the entry plan. The cloud trial lasts only five days. Commercial support subscriptions are sold separately.

Checkmk is an infrastructure and network monitoring platform offered in self-hosted and SaaS editions. Its free Community edition covers up to about 100 hosts with community support. Paid self-hosted editions are Pro, from €190 per month billed annually (equivalent to about 3,000 services, or as low as about €1.90 per host per month) with 8x5 support, and Ultimate, from €275 per month with 10x5 support; Ultimate is described as suited to multinationals and MSPs and has a separate multi-tenancy trial build.

Checkmk Cloud, the SaaS edition, costs €240 per month at 1,000 services, about €7.20 per host per month assuming 30 services per host, and scales to 50,000 services. Pricing by service, rather than by device, rewards organisations that monitor a moderate number of metrics per host.

All paid editions have 30-day trials; when a self-hosted trial expires the installation continues in a free mode limited to 750 services and one site. The breadth of editions and options takes time to evaluate, and service-based licensing requires an estimate of services per host. Prices are published in euros.

WhatsUp Gold is a network monitoring product from Progress Software. It covers infrastructure, performance and traffic monitoring, with network detection and response, virtualisation monitoring that maps virtual infrastructure to physical hosts, and a Distributed Mode for managing remote sites.

Pricing is published per 50 devices per year: Business starts at US$1,229 with one installation and 10x5 email support; Enterprise at US$2,049 with up to two installations, advanced reporting and 24x5 phone and email support; and Enterprise Plus at US$3,469 with up to four installations. Enterprise Scale, with a custom number of installations, is quote-based. Add-ons include Network Detection and Response Lite from US$866 a year and virtual network performance monitoring sensors from US$520 a year each. Prices exclude taxes.

WhatsUp Gold's per-device annual pricing is easy to forecast for stable networks, and a free trial is available. Its installation-count limits per tier and on-premises architecture make it less suited to large distributed or cloud-first estates than SaaS platforms.

Kentik is a network intelligence and observability platform for monitoring, analysing and securing networks from the data centre to the cloud. Its core is large-scale traffic analysis: network telemetry and flow data are stored in the Kentik Data Engine and explored with a Universal Data Explorer, alongside multi-cloud observability, a network monitoring system, SD-WAN monitoring and synthetic testing. Security and service-provider features include DDoS detection, peering and interconnection analysis and BGP route monitoring.

Kentik AI Advisor answers network questions in plain language, such as whether a traffic spike is an attack, and Kentik claims it cuts investigation time by 96%. Customers named on its site include ServiceNow, Box, New Relic, Zoom and Booking.com.

Kentik publishes one price: the Pro plan starts at US$2,000 per month billed annually (US$24,000 a year) for up to 50 users, while Premier, for up to 1,000 users, is quote-based; only annual contracts are offered, and international customers must request pricing. A 30-day free trial is available. The cost and focus on flow analytics make Kentik more relevant to large networks than to small offices.

Domotz is a network monitoring and management platform licensed per Collector, an agent that covers one site or network. Every plan includes unlimited devices, users, technicians and read-only viewers, which makes cost independent of the number of devices on each site; per-device licensing is available through sales.

The standard price is €35 per site per month for MSPs, IT teams and commercial integrators, and €20 per home for residential integrators. With a 12-month term, MSP and commercial integrator rates fall with volume, from €31.50 at five sites to €17.50 at 500 or more sites. A 14-day trial with full platform access requires no credit card, and devices configured during the trial remain after purchase.

The model suits organisations with many small locations, such as MSP clients, retail branches or audio-visual installations. Large single sites with thousands of devices may find per-site licensing generous, but Domotz's analytics are less extensive than enterprise platforms such as SolarWinds NPM or Kentik.

LibreNMS is a free, community-developed network monitoring system. It automatically discovers devices using CDP, FDP, LLDP, OSPF, BGP, SNMP and ARP, and offers flexible alert rules with notifications by email, IRC, Slack and other channels. Other features include a full API, bandwidth billing for ports, automatic updates, distributed polling, mobile apps for iPhone and Android and a mobile-friendly web interface.

LibreNMS integrates with established open-source network tools such as NfSen, collectd, SmokePing, RANCID and Oxidized, and supports authentication via MySQL, HTTP, LDAP, RADIUS and Active Directory. These integrations suit network teams that assemble their own open-source toolchain.

Support is community-based, primarily through Discord and a forum, with GitHub issues reserved for new device support; commercial SLA-backed support is available through Config Services Ltd. Like Zabbix, LibreNMS requires in-house administration and Linux skills, and it focuses on network devices rather than application performance.