10 Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools in 2024 | Better Stack Community (2024)

Infrastructure monitoring gives you insight into the overall health of yourproject. By collecting and analyzing data coming from IT infrastructure,systems, and processes, you can prevent incidents, evaluate performance, betteroptimize and scale, or find a root cause of everything that's happening withinyour system.

The world is becoming more digital every day. This puts a lot of stress onservice providers since the performance of their infrastructure ismission-critical for countless clients or end-users. Even small misconfigurationerrors or DNS outages can cut people from communicating with the outside world,source of income, or cause other issues.

Infrastructure monitoring ensures that we prevent these major outages, or in theworst-case scenarios reduce the time necessary for a resolution to a minimum.

Benefits of Infrastructure monitoring

Having a good infrastructure monitoring solution allows:

• Project performance optimization
• Enhancement of the user experience
• Capacity to ingest data from a wide array of sources and handle it during bothplanned and unplanned traffic overloads
• Monitoring of detecting and reporting outages, bad resource management, andperformance decrease trends over time
• Using collected data to determine the root cause
• Proactive monitoring, which helps to prevent issues before they occur

What to monitor with Infrastructure monitoring?

• Hardware. Collect and analyze data from sensors, such as battery life, CPU andMemory usage, Disk space, fan speed, or user-defined custom sensors.
• Network. Make sure that your internal network is performing as it is supposedto. IT infrastructure monitors often offer network monitoring solutions usefulnot only for performance evaluation but also security.
• Applications. Tracking application performance and user behavior is essentialfor good infrastructure monitoring.

Best Practices in Infrastructure Monitoring

• Organize your notifications and alerts. Infrastructure generates enormousamounts of data each day, and not all logs are essential for monitoring. Byattributing importance to specific types of notifications, setting thresholdsand custom rules, you will receive notifications and alerts in a logicalmanner, which will be beneficial in incident resolution.
• Monitor Baseline Metrics and KPIs. No matter how accurate, your thresholds andalerts are not permanent because your system changes over time due to bothinternal and external factors. A systemic review of these values will ensureconsistent and accurate results.
• Pick your partner wisely. The market is saturated with professional andprogressive monitoring solutions, and in order to survive, each needs to standout a bit in their respective fields. You can use this to your advantage,study and compare each solution closely and pick the one that will suit youthe most. If they offer a free solution or a trial period, don't hesitate andgo for it.
• Make sure your teams get the right data. Infrastructure monitoring can producea lot of operationally valuable data. However, not every team can work withthe same data equally. Customize data visualization and dashboards for eachteam individually.

We went over the basics of Infrastructure Monitoring. Now it's time to take alook at the Best Infrastructure Monitoring tools in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a modern Infrastructure Monitoringplatform offering a broad spectrum of monitoring tools. Its main focus lies onInfrastructure monitoring andIncident management, and properdowntime communication with Public Status Pages. Each HTTP or ping-basedincident is verified from multiple geolocations to guarantee the authenticity ofthe alert and integration into the most popular platforms, alongside unlimitedphone calls, ensure that you will be the first one to know about any incident.

Better Stack covers the monitoring of key infrastructure aspects such asWebsite Uptime, Networks, Applications, and Cloud. Every incident is reportedwith a second by second incident timeline and filtered by a smart incidentmerging tool to save time and let you focus on the root-cause analysis. BetterStack, also offers Logtail a modern and effective log management tool. These twotools, working in tandem pres ent an unparalleled full-stack monitoring solutionscalable from start-ups all the way to Enterprise solutions.

Basic Better Stack package is available for free, with 90 seconds checkingperiod, 10 monitors, free e-mail alerts, and integration into Slack and MSTeams. Paid subscriptions start with the Freelancer package for $24/month,offering Push notifications for iOS and Android, Post-mortems, Uptime monitoringtools, and a 30 seconds check frequency. The Small Team solution, starting at$64/month, includes 100 monitors, on-call scheduling, and more than 200+integrations, alongside enhanced uptime monitoring and incident managementtools. If you are looking for a solution for multiple teams, reach out for theBusiness Package or book a demo with one of the engineers and ask for a customquote.

Main benefits of Better Stack:

• Better Stack offers a combination ofIncident Management,Infrastructure Monitoring, andStatus Pages
• Can work in tandem with Better Stack Logs for afull-stack monitoring platform
• Reasonable Pricing model

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one platform for full-stack monitoring. It offersout-of-the-box insights into your infrastructure. Advanced observability isavailable at scale for all infrastructure and is fully automatic. Dynatracecollects data from the cloud, hybrid, containers, VMs, network, servers,storage, and many more.

Thanks to advanced observability across PaaS and container technologies likeAWS, Azure, Kubernetes, or Cloud Foundry, you gain access to process detectionand resource utilization, network usage, and performance, log monitoring. Or youcan hold your partners accountable and verify their SLAs by third-party data andevent monitoring integration. However, Dynatrace's complexity comes with aprice, and fully plunging into how it works takes time.

You can get Dynatrace as a full-stack monitoring solution or pick just theInfrastructure monitoring solution. The Full-stack monitoring package starts at$69/month. Infrastructure monitoring starts at $21/month for 8GB per Host.

Main Benefits of Dynatrace

• Automated monitoring, discovery, and dependencies mapping
• Customizable dashboards
• Incident management automatization

3. Zabbix

Zabbix is a full-stack, Enterprise ready open source monitoring tool licensedunder the GNU GPL2 license. It allows you to monitor everything from Network,via Server and Cloud, to Applications and services. Zabbix can run eitheron-premise or on one of the many supported cloud platforms. Zabbix offersunlimited scalability for any infrastructure, flexible monitoring andvisualization tools, and seamless deployment that will take no more than 10minutes. All of the collected data is handled by widget-based dashboards, whichcan be customized with a drag and drop.

Zabbix allows you to collect metrics from Network devices, Cloud, containers andvirtual machines, Databases, Applications, HTTP(s) endpoints, and many more.Alerting is handled by multiple platforms, including On-Call, Opsgenie,Pagerduty, Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, or Webhooks.

Zabbix offers a full set of education courses and materials with recognizedcertificates, confirming a certain level of expertise in Zabbix's function.Zabbix is really lightweight, but offers support for almost every aspect ofinfrastructure aspects and is kept alive and growing by its strong community,but also commercial clients and support.

Zabbix is open-source, so there are no subscription packages. However, you canenroll in one of their courses or purchase advice in the form of technicalsupport or consulting.

Main Benefits of Zabbix:

• An open-source tool, offering an enterprise-ready solution
• A lot of seminars and other forms of education are available

4. Elastic Stack

Elastic or the ELK stack is a synthesis of three open-source tools. E stands forElasticsearch used to search and filter different kinds of data. L stands forLogstash that serves as the log management and analysis tool, and K for Kibana,which handles data visualization. These tools combined offer a powerful insightinto your infrastructure.

Fleek, the Unified Elastic Agent with centralized management, allows you tocollect and manage logs from infrastructure sources like AWS, Azure, GCP, Kafka,and Nginx. You can also break down application and infrastructure silos byenriching log entries with metadata for faster root cause detection.

While the ELK is available for free, you still have to pay for means necessaryto run ELK like infrastructure, storage, or network, which can get reallyexpensive from a certain point. ELK stack is really a swiss knife when it comesto infrastructure monitoring, and while that's certainly a good thing, itsdeployment and configuration can get really challenging.

Main Benefits of the ELK Stack:

• Real-time data collection and analysis
• Support for multiple scripting and programming languages
• Option to be hosted either on-premise or on cloud

5. New Relic

New Relic is a complete monitoring tool collecting data from the whole stack.Using New Relic, you can analyze and put into context data from logs,infrastructure, apps, or cloud services in one place. Thanks to real-timeinformation on essential performance metrics, you can always evaluate theoverall state and performance of your system, predict and prevent any possibleissues. By correlating data and visualizing relationships, you can enrich yourroot-cause analysis with valuable data.

New Relics offers visibility of your infrastructure on every level within afive-minute setup and zero maintenance. With a proactive approach, you canimmediately detect changes in your ecosystem. You can also observe the overallstate of your entire system across all your hosts and reduce risks bytroubleshooting workflow.

New Relic offers a free subscription package for one full user, 100GB of dataingestion per month, more than 8 days of metrics retention, unlimited querying,and 100 Synthetic Checks. You also get Unlimited free alerts, Proactive AnomalyDetection, and 1k free incident intelligence events per month. Support ishandled by a community forum. Premium subscriptions work as an upgrade on top ofthe Free tier, meaning that you pay only for what you use extra and get accessto more features. Pro and Enterprise tiers are also available on-demand.

Main Benefits of New Relic

• Full observability from one dashboard
• Easy on-boarding

6. AppDynamics (Cisco)

AppDynamics is a modern monitoring solution focused on raising effectiveness andmodernization. The product is available either as an on-premise deployment or asa SaaS. Thanks to its full-stack background, Appdynamics collects, compares, andanalyzes data from the entire infrastructure and helps to find the root causemuch faster.

Their intelligent optimization tool allows you to visualize every component ofthe infrastructure ranging from the server, through databases, to hybrid andcloud-native environments and help you to ensure optimal applicationperformance.

AppDynamics offers a plethora of solutions and tools, which makes it quite hardto grasp. Also, the lack of automation during the set-up process might pleaseonly the more experienced users.

Infrastructure monitoring prices depend on the number of CPU Cores used andstart at $6/month per CPU core. For complete back-end monitoring, you can trythe Premium Edition for $60/month per CPU core or the Enterprise Editionstarting at $90/month per CPU core.

Main Benefits of AppDynamics

• Business Observability
• AppDynamics university

7. Site24x7

Site24x7 is also an all-in-one monitoring tool offering either a full-stacksolution or individual features for Website, Infrastructure, APM, or aMonitoring as a Service, remote monitoring tool. On top of that, Site24x7 offersa lot of Free Tools for Network, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineers,covering tools for Domain, Sysadmins, Developers, Cloud, Content, and many more.

Site24x7 solution features an Automated discovery, Mapping, and Monitoring ofnetwork devices. All the data collected are represented in dashboards, givingyou a complete overview of your infrastructure's performance and health. Plentyof third-party integrations are available, and if you find you need custommonitoring plugins, you can write your own using Shell, PowerShell, Batch, VB,or Python.

Site24x7 offers both an All-in-one monitoring solution starting at $35/month orjust the Infrastructure monitoring package starting at $9/month. In thispackage, you get access to monitoring of 10 Websites/Servers/Clouds, a 500MB ofLogs capacity, Cron, Kubernetes, StatsD Metrics monitoring, and more. You canalso customize your subscription with Add-ons, which cover Basic and AdvancedMonitor Add-ons, Network Monitoring Interfaces Add-ons, NetFlow analyzer, or Logmanagement.

Main Benefits of Site24x7:

• Full-observability possible
• Automated Discovery and Mapping

8. Datadog

Datadog offers a complete visibility solution into infrastructure performancewith easy deployment and minimal maintenance. Thanks to more than 450vendor-backed integrations, you can monitor all your cloud, on-premise servers,container, databases, and more services from one platform. Using anomalydetection and metrics correlation, you can detect root causes of incidentsfaster. Customizable drag-and-drop dashboards can be created within seconds andallow you to track all the important information at all times.

Datadog's infrastructure monitoring offers a free subscription, including Corecollection and visualization features. Support is handled by a discussion group,you get 1-day metric retention and up to 5 hosts. Datadog also guaranteesEnterprise-Grade security, Host and Container Maps, Out-of-the-box Dashboards,and product training videos. If you are looking for a more complex solution, youcan reach for the Pro(for $15/month) or Enterprise(for $23/month) packages.

Main benefits of Datadog:

• Custom Metrics
• More than 450 vendor-backed integrations are available

9. Prometheus

Prometheus is available as an open-source project, available under the Apache 2License on GitHub with more than 40 thousand stars. Prometheus implements ahighly dimensional data model identifying time series data by metric name andkey/value pairs. You can also benefit from a flexible query language PromQL.

Prometheus is mostly written in Go. It scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs,stores them, and then runs rules over this data, and if needed, generatesalerts. Visualization is handled by Grafana.

Prometheus is great for reliable monitoring, but as they put it, you should notgo for it if you need 100% accuracy, such as for per-request billing. Itsdocumentation is well-written and open-source, and Prometheus still has a lot ofactive developers from the community.

Main Benefits of Prometheus:

• Reliability
• Open source license and well-written documentation
• A dynamic community of active developers

10. Sematext

Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring offers full-stack observability into yourwhole infrastructure. It offers real-time insights into both on-site servers andthe cloud. You can use it to overview the overall health of your infrastructureby collecting metrics from Applications, servers, containers, processes, events,databases, and more.

Sematext allows you to observe containerized applications running in Docker orplatforms like K8s, Docker Swarm, or Nomad. You can benefit from its automateddiscovery features and anomaly detection for alerting. Integrations withincident management tools such as PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call, andWebhooks are possible.

You can try Sematext Infrastructure Monitoring in a 14-day free trial. Fromthere you can choose one of their premium pricing tiers, including one free forup to three hosts, or Standard and Pro, starting at around $0.007/container hostper hour.

Main Benefits of Sematext:

• Automated Discovery and Sematext Agent
• 100+ integrations for the most popular stacks.

Conclusion

In this article, we went through the basics of Infrastructure monitoring, itssignificance, benefits, and best practices. Then we went through the best toolsfor Infrastructure monitoring in 2023. The most rational next step seems to beto dig deeper, pick your favorites and find out which tool suits your needs themost.