Announcing the Top Rated Network Performance Monitoring Tools for 2019

We are excited to announce the Top Rated Network Performance Monitoring Tools for 2019! Top Rated awards showcase today’s top-of-the-line product in Network Performance Monitoring based solely on positive user feedback and satisfaction scores. These awards make the voice of the market the primary decider into the industry’s best products.

Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are never influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. 

Here are the winners:

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a network monitoring solution supporting multi-network infrastructures. NPM is designed to help IT administrators in preventing outages, troubleshooting issues, and managing network alerts. On TrustRadius, reviewers of SolarWinds NPM primarily use it at enterprises (44%) and midsize companies (43%). Reviewers enjoy easy network discovery and mapping, customizable alerting, as well as total extensibility to cover network monitoring and management needs via the comprehensive SolarWinds product line.

“We use NPM for the Monitoring of network devices across the whole organization for all our offices around the world. We are using Netpath services as well as the user device tracker, NetFlow etc. to monitor and troubleshoot various issues on a day-to-day basis. It addresses our various problems by providing insights on different statistics e.g. we can actually see the end to the path in the internet for services, and it actually tells us any packet loss or latency in the internet between end to end nodes — that’s so cool. :)”

– Har Ranjit Singh | Senior Network Analyst | Public Safety

PRTG Network Monitor

Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor is a software tool designed to monitor all devices, applications, virtual environments or anything residing on an IT infrastructure. Beyond health of network devices, the software can monitor bandwidth usage, cloud service and PaaS utilization, and virtualized application usage. On TrustRadius the product is mostly reviewed (52%) by users at midsize companies. Reviewers report relying on PRTG Network Monitor’s pre-configured sensors to monitor a wide variety of equipment, servers, and services and describe an easy setup process.

“From a business standpoint, it allows us to monitor many systems all at once, with a quick overview, which saves us from having to receive alerts from multiple places or watch several different screens… The ability to analyze multiple pieces of information in one place, especially with historical data, has saved our IT department time and headaches. It would be so much more difficult to trace an issue without PRTG, just relying on event logs and an open task manager window.”

– Robert Paul | Technical Administrator | Government Administration

Nagios

Nagios is a full stack IT infrastructure monitoring application suite. Nagios includes Nagios XI for server and network monitoring, Nagios Network Analyzer for bandwidth utilization, and Nagios Fusion’s comprehensive dashboard for centralization of monitoring and management. Users of Nagios for network performance and downtime tracking can oversee a distributed IT environment from this centralized console, and review alerts through customizable views. On TrustRadius the product is mostly reviewed by users at midsize companies (42%) and enterprises (38%). Nagios users like that they can detect potential network issues before they start and favor Nagios’ up/down monitoring and device health and status checks.

“I decided to implement [Nagios] for a few dozen servers in the organization. However over time, the server-count had increased to 500+ while service-counts increased to 5000+. Nagios continued to remain stable for years on a simple dual-core(2Gb machine). Its ability to proactively detect issues in the system keeps our engineers informed hours (or days) ahead of a pending disaster…  Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.”

– Shawn Brito | Senior Systems Architect | Computer Software

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Network Performance Monitoring Tools Award!

What are Network Performance Monitoring Tools?

Network performance monitoring tools are software used by network administrators to monitor bandwidth usage, downtime, and device activity (e.g. up/down monitoring). They also help administrators interpret alerts and trace them to their cause. Beyond monitoring networks for faults, this software may also provide a network map, discover network devices and changes to network devices, and perform health checks for connected hardware. 

Large scale network performance monitoring software may provide means to monitor activity and help ensure service across a distributed or global network (e.g. a media company). Some tools present a stronger option for smaller, localized networks (e.g. a school campus). For enterprises with hybrid infrastructure and MSPs, these systems may provide means of monitoring application and cloud resource usage, or track performance of third-party network devices (e.g. firewalls). 

Many performance monitoring tools can provide analysis to predict capacity exhaustion, and prepare for expansion. Functionality related to network performance monitoring is found in network troubleshooting tools and network diagnostics tools. Some network performance-oriented tools may also provide limited network security features, such as network behavior analysis.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Network Performance Monitoring Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of August 1st, 2019. To qualify for the Network Performance Monitoring Tools Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.