Comparison of network monitoring systems

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable network monitoring systems. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.

Legend

 * Product Name : The name of the software, linked to its Wikipedia article.
 * IP SLAs Reports : Support of Cisco's IP Service Level Agreement mechanism.
 * Logical Grouping : Supports arranging the hosts or devices it monitors into user-defined groups.
 * Trending : Provides trending of network data over time.
 * Trend Prediction : The software features algorithms designed to predict future network statistics.
 * Auto Discovery : The software automatically discovers hosts or network devices it is connected to.
 * Agentless : The product does not rely on a software agent that must run on hosts it is monitoring, so that data can be pushed back to a central server. "Supported" means that an agent may be used, but is not mandatory. An SNMP daemon does not count as an agent.
 * SNMP : Able to retrieve and report on SNMP statistics.
 * Syslog : Able to receive and report on Syslogs.
 * Plugins : Architecture of the software based on a number of 'plugins' that provide additional functionality.
 * Triggers/Alerts : Capable of detecting threshold violations in network data, and alerting the administrator in some form.
 * WebApp : Runs as a web-based application.
 * No: There is no web-based frontend for this software.
 * Viewing: Network data can be viewed in a graphical web-based frontend.
 * Acknowledging: Users can interact with the software through the web-based frontend to acknowledge alarms or manipulate other notifications.
 * Reporting: Specific reports on network data can be configured by the user and executed through the web-based frontend.
 * Full Control: ALL aspects of the product can be controlled through the web-based frontend, including low-level maintenance tasks such as software configuration and upgrades.


 * Distributed Monitoring : Able to leverage more than one server to distribute the load of network monitoring.
 * Inventory : Keeps a record of hardware and/or software inventory for the hosts and devices it monitors.
 * Platform : The platform (Coding Language) on which the tool was developed/written.
 * Data Storage Method : Main method used to store the network data it monitors.
 * License : License released under (e.g. GPL, BSD license, etc.).
 * Maps : Features graphical network maps that represent the hosts and devices it monitors, and the links between them.
 * Access Control : Features user-level security, allowing an administrator to prevent access to certain parts of the product on a per-user or per-role basis.
 * IPv6 : Supports monitoring IPv6 hosts and/or devices, receiving IPv6 data, and running on an IPv6-enabled server. Supports communication using IPv6 to the SNMP agent via an IPv6 address.