by Today, Linux is a great operating system, powering much of the Internet. According to W3Techs, almost half of today’s top 1 million websites run on Linux. Let’s say you want your site and the application(s) running on it to be high-performance – with lots of uptime. Therefore, you need to ensure the availability and reliability of your Linux-based servers. Plenty of great Linux monitoring tools and software on the market can help you effectively monitor the health and performance of your Linux server. It allows you to automate alerts to respond to issues faster and minimize the impact on your end users’ experience.
Linux Monitoring Tools You Should Have A Note
Here is a list of open-source Linux monitoring tools to help you improve your performance.
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- ManageEngine OpManager
- Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring
- Zabbix
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
- Site24x7 Linux Monitoring
- PRTG Network Monitor
- Prometheus and Grafaan
- Nagios Core
- Datadog
- OpenNMS
- Zenoss Core
- ntopng
- DStat
- Bwm-ng
- Monitorix
- vnStat
- IPTraf ( Free and also Paid)
ManageEngine OpManager
In our list of Linux monitoring tools, ManageEngine OpManager is free for small enterprises. It is a great Linux monitoring tool that provides network and performance monitoring capabilities for Linux servers. It gives you real-time visibility into metrics like CPU usage, memory usage, server availability, disk I/O usage, and network traffic. Your customizable dashboard has plenty of built-in performance widgets to suit your monitoring needs.
Features
- It monitors physical and virtual Linux servers
- It has a powerful alarm, notification, and alert system
- It creates custom dashboards and more to see multiple views of your infrastructure
- It has auto-discovery of devices and systems on your network
- It has a 3D rack view for visualization.
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Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring
It offers a freemium version of its software, and you can try the full version with all the features for free. You don’t need a credit card. This platform can monitor your networks, servers, and applications no matter their location, and it checks on server, memory, CPU, and disk capacity and usage. It includes desktops in the monitoring plan, whether they run Windows or Linux.
It is accessible from anywhere through any standard browser. An auto-setup process downloads an agent to your site, traces all devices connected to the network, and creates a network map. It establishes a network and software inventory, which is continuously updated. Also, it makes an application dependency map that offers a summary view and drills down detail screen to monitor individual devices.
Features
- It can integrate the monitoring of resources on multiple sites.
- It monitors all resources from the network to servers and applications.
- It offers a summary view and drill-down detail screen to monitor individual devices.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a free Linux monitoring tool with powerful analytics and encryption functionality. It provides an open-source monitoring solution for any server, cloud, network, application, or database. You can also use it to monitor your Linux server and collect performance metrics, network bandwidth usage, CPU usage, and available disk space.
It offers out-of-the-box templates with pre-configured metrics, graphs, triggers, applications, screens, and rules that you can view and use on a central Zabbix server. It allows you to configure triggers based on logical tests for monitored statistics (for example, if the load average per CPU on a Linux server is too high). After that, you can define an action based on trigger events to deliver notifications and alerts via email, SMS, script alerts, or webhooks—or let Zabbix fix the problem by running remote scripts.
Features
- It supports the functionality of automatically discovering and registering.
- It offers much flexibility to define the options you want.
- It integrates well with many third-party tools.
- It also supports operating systems such as Solaris, Linux, BSD, IBM AIX, IBM Power8, HP-UX, and MacOS.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide automated tools that allow you to track the performance of your applications and Linux servers. It lets you quickly see the usage of Linux server resources, such as CPU, memory, networking, disk usage, and processes. So now you can optimize server and application configurations.
SAM offers a free 30-day trial, a subscription plan, and a perpetual license per number of mods. Pricing starts at $1,622 for a subscription and $2,995 for a perpetual license, up to 1,000 nodes. SAM uses agentless and agent data-collection mechanisms for remote Linux monitoring. Also, you can monitor system performance to detect problems such as high response times and network packet loss or resource usage and track processes. There are also built-in Linux monitoring tool templates for applications running on Linux servers, like Apache Tomcat.
Features
- It identifies which users and applications are using the most bandwidth.
- It provides instant notification when usage exceeds bandwidth usage thresholds.
- It allows you to create custom IP address groups to view traffic how you want.
- You get a comprehensive view of your network traffic in a single pane.
- It helps set up customized views of Internet traffic for ISPs to understand better how it is balanced between different service providers.
- NBAR2 provides support to various vendors and technologies such as NetFlow v9, NetFlow v5, sFlow v2, IPFIX, v4,v5, U-Flow, Huawei, Cisco, Extreme Networks, HP, Juniper, Nortel Networks, vSwitch, and VMware.
- Identifying potential problems and getting to their root is pretty easy, as you can create custom views of available data.
Site24x7 Linux Monitoring
Site24x7 can monitor services and processes on your Linux servers, giving you their CPU and memory usage and visibility into thread counts. Its powerful dashboards allow you to view all metrics collected and make instant decisions. You can configure alerts when problems occur. It offers a free 30-day trial. After that, you can monitor up to ten servers for $9 per month with the option to purchase additional instances or various add-ons.
Linux Monitoring tool is a cloud-based monitoring system that focuses on the performance of all IT services behind user-facing software. It includes applications, services, servers, and networks. The main processing services of the tool reside in the cloud, but it requires an agent to be installed on-site. An agent for Linux servers looks after all the infrastructure, including the hosting server.
Features
- It supports Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE, CoreOS, Raspberry Pi, and Arch Linux ARM.
- It is the monitoring of applications, such as LAMP components.
- Syslog and application log management.
- Resource monitor on CPU, memory, disk, and other server resources.
- Integrated monitoring of Linux servers with servers running Windows servers and cloud servers
- A web-based console with customizable screens, live performance tracking, and historical data analysis utilities.
- Problem notification by SMS, voice call, email, and instant messaging post.
PRTG Network Monitor
The most popular free network monitoring tool is PRTG Network Monitor. It is a Linux performance monitoring system that uses sensors to monitor a single metric in your network (e.g., the traffic of a switch port, free drive space, or CPU load). At least you need 5-10 sensors. PRTG offers a 30-day free trial. Server licenses start at $1,750 per server for up to 500 sensors, or you can purchase a perpetual license for a one-time payment. For more knowledge, please visit this website. https://www.paessler.com/prtg
Features
- It provides an overview and in-depth information about Linux device status and performance.
- Also, it gives information about the low and high capacity to plan better.
- NTP monitors various devices, such as hard drives and memory.
- You will get instant notifications of bandwidth overload and other essential features.
- Linux makes it easy to identify critical weak points and network imbalances.
- It is easy to install and quick to start.
- It supports enormous languages such as English, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese.
Prometheus and Grafaan
Prometheus and Grafana are completely open-source and can be downloaded and used for free. They are used together as open-source monitoring and alerting solutions with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects Linux hardware and OS metrics published by the nix kernel and then stores them as time-series data using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in the multidimensional data model of timestamped metrics. You can easily connect Grafana dashboards for data visualization to your Prometheus server or use pre-built official or community Grafana dashboards for Prometheus data sources.
Features
- Low infrastructure requirements
- Multidimensional data models of numerical time-series data; Suitable for distributed Linux servers
- It supports automatic service discovery for target Linux servers.
Nagios Core
Nagios Core is a free, open-source Linux/Unix system monitoring and alerting tool that can extend through custom plugins, providing flexible Linux server monitoring. It monitors data, including OS metrics, service/process status, CPU, memory, ping rate, and disk usage. There are many community plugins for different Linux server distributions. Nagios Core is an open-source solution offering unlimited customization if your team has the skills.
Features
- Remedies use event handlers that can automatically restart failed applications or Linux servers.
- It supports trending and capacity planning for Linux server upgrades.
Datadog
Datadog offers a 14-day free trial. There are three pricing systems: Free (up to five hosts with 1-day metric retention), Pro (per host, $15 per month), and Enterprise (per host, $23 per month). Datadog is a server-to-application monitor that maps all services supporting user interfaces to server operating systems.
It is a cloud-based system that can monitor Linux servers anywhere in the world and mixes monitoring of servers with different operating systems. The tools are capable of consolidating the tracking of geographically distributed servers. It supports infrastructure behind the front end, such as databases and web servers, and creates a summary resource map of all registered servers.
Features
- A colorful and eye-catching dashboard includes a live status graphical representation.
- A widget has screens that users can customize via a drag-and-drop utility.
- It offers a mapping of application interdependencies.
- It shows which applications use which server resources and to what extent at any given time.
- It enables a root cause analysis of application performance issues.
OpenNMS
OpenNMS is one of the free Linux monitoring tools for networks running on Linux hosts. It has dynamic stability, and a large community supports it for use. This open-source network management platform helps with network monitoring solutions. It works remotely and monitors application services. It collects performance metrics from industry standards such as SNMP, WMI, and XMP.
Features
- RestAPI makes it very easy to integrate OpenNMS into your existing infrastructure.
- It discovers the network topology.
- It comes with an interactive service map to make it easy to solve problems now.
- Backshift graph visualization helps tap into time series storage.
- A geographic node map shows nodes and service outages in different geographic areas using Google Maps or Open Street Maps.
- Performance data visualization based on Graphner enhances the visual appeal of the information.
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Zenoss Core
Xenos Core is a free Linux monitoring system for servers, networks, and applications that can be extended by Xenos Packs and Nagios plugins. It runs on Linux, and it is a cloud-based solution that has an extensive network. At the same time, it provides essential monitoring for small and medium businesses.
It helps build the most granular and intelligent relationship infrastructure and provides deep performance insights for any IT environment. It shares insights with other ITOM tools, reduces the average time to resolution, automates processes, and streamlines operations for greater efficiency.
Features
- It supports new business tools and simplifies cloud migration.
- It eliminates the risks associated with digital transformation.
- It provides capacity optimization and helps transition to event-driven results.
- It increases IT visibility and also reduces overhead.
- It comes with Smart View, a machine learning-based user interface.
ntopng
ntopng is a free open-source tool for network monitoring. It is a security network monitoring tool that also passively monitors web activity, and it is a High-Speed Web-based Traffic Analysis and Flow Collection.
This tools is the next generation, which means the latest version of the original ntop, a network traffic probe that monitors network usage. It is based on libpcap/PF_RING and is written in a portable way to run on virtually every Unix platform, MacOS, and Windows. It provides an intuitive, encrypted web user interface for searching real-time and historical traffic data. For more information, you can visit here.
Features
- It shows real-time network traffic and active hosts.
- It produces long-term reports for several network metrics, including throughput and L7 application protocols.
- It monitors, and reports live throughput, network and application latencies, TCP statistics (retransmissions, Round Trip Time (RTT), out-of-order packets, packet loss), and bytes and packets transmitted.
- It stores on disk persistent traffic statistics to allow future explorations and post-mortem analyses.
DStat
DStat is a versatile free asset statistics tool that replaces vmstat, iostat, netstat, and ifstat. It allows you to view all system resources in real-time and displays detailed selection information in columns for better readability. It can easily extend this tool’s functionality to create custom counters and export data to CSV files. Statistics show the same timeframe as they occurred. Written in Python, so it’s easy to extend. It also includes many external plugins.
Features
- It displays the number of interrupts per device.
- It shows correct units, so conversion errors are significantly reduced, and it also displays intermediate results if the delay is greater than one.
- It allows you to see the throughput of all the block devices that make up a single file system or storage system.
Bwm-ng
Bandwidth Monitor NG is a console-based free tool ideal for network and disk-io bandwidth monitoring for Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Solaris. Bwm-ng Supports an unlimited number of devices and interfaces. You can allow or blocklist interfaces and devices. It curses the plain console, displaying output in CSV or HTML format.
Features
- It displays many parameters like error, average, maximum, and total sum.
- It supports many aspects/technologies/functions such as proc, ne, dev, netstat, getifaddr, IOKit, devstat, libstatgrab, kstat, sysctl, and more.
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Monitorix
Monitorix is a free, lightweight utility designed to run and monitor as many systems and network resources as possible on Linux/Unix servers. It has a built-in HTTP web server that regularly collects system and network information and displays it in graphs. It monitors system load averages and usage, memory allocation, disk driver health, system services, network ports, mail statistics (Sendmail, postfix, dovecot, etc.), MySQL statistics, and more.
Features
- It monitors overall system performance and helps identify failures, interruptions, abnormal operations, etc.
- It is recently in active development adding new features, new graphs, and fixing bugs in an effort to offer an excellent tool for daily system administration.
vnStat
VnStat PHP is a free web-based frontend application for the most popular networking tool, “vnstat.” This tool beautifully monitors network traffic usage in graphical mode. A console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD logs network traffic for the selected interface(s). VnStat uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as the data source. It means that vnStat does not sniff any traffic and ensures light usage of system resources regardless of network traffic rates.
Features
- It displays total IN and OUT network traffic usage in hourly, daily, monthly, and complete summary reports.
- Minimal resources usages
- It is used without any root permissions.
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IPTraf ( Free and also Paid)
In our list of Linux Monitoring Tools, IPTraf is a Ncurses-based, user-friendly network monitoring tool and a free bandwidth monitoring app offering a paid version. It is an open-source console-based real-time network (IP LAN) monitoring utility for Linux. It collects various information such as TCP flag information, ICMP details, TCP/UDP traffic breakdown, and TCP connection packets and monitors IP traffic passing over the network, including byte count.
Features
- It also collects general and detailed interface statistics information on TCP, UDP, IP, ICMP, non-IP, IP checksum errors, interface activity, etc.
Ending Words
These were the essential Linux monitoring tools to monitor your Linux/Unix machines; of course, there are many more tools, but these are the most famous. We hope these monitoring tools help you monitor your Linux environment.
If we need to remember any tools or include something, please email us, and we’ll add them below to the list of Linux monitoring tools and software.
