Best 8 Network Monitoring Tools [Free Versions] – NOC

What are the best practices for a NOC?

Best practices for a network operations center – prepare training, rely upon clearly portrayed roles, and set up clear protocols for communication.

Concentrate on training and knowledge improvement:

Your NOC team must have high-level expertise, expressly in monitoring, managing, and resolving issues specific to network performance and your IT infrastructure. Give powerful and persistent training on procedures and protocols for any event, and keep up-to-date on changing tech scenario and changes to your own IT environment. Organizing network performance issues, yet don’t neglect procedures for cooperating with your SOC on security issues. A key procedural issue is an escalation; guarantee your staff knows how and when to make the quick decision to raise a growing issue to a more experienced associate.

Assign clear jobs:

Flatter organizational systems are more popular these days. In the fast-paced, must-act-now world of network monitoring, it looks good to empower every associate instead of firmly requesting position or role-based handoffs. In any case, while technicians need to be outfitted with the data and capacity to act quickly to resolve network failures, you still need escalation levels and shift supervisors to administer the NOC.

NOC technicians are responsible to complete their assigned tasks and share knowledge on the same. And by choice, they need to be micromanaged. You still require a leader who assigns work to techs based on their skills, decide tasks, access reports, make sure to resolve all the reported incidents promptly, and represents the more extended organization of events as required.

Also, every technician should know specifically what projects will be assigned to them, their level, and the line of reporting, should they have to escalate an incident or respond to one.

Enable a solid communication system:

Keeping the lines of communication open within the NOC, SOC, and other external teams can wind up being troublesome. It’s unquestionably something beyond setting up a few occasional meetings. Sometimes, it needs a solid effort to plan staff – in sharing information and thinking of them as responsible contacts for the same. Creating regular opportunities for cooperation and coordination is imperative to a solid NOC.

Build clear principles and protocols:

Keep things running smoothly by making evident policies for the following:

Incident management:

Document steps the technician should follow to manage incidents like – When the technician can make a decision, when to escalate the decision, when to suggest associates, and so on

Solutions:

Outline procedures for managing ordinary issues and give fast strategies for managing emergencies.

Escalation:

Escalation procedures for encountered issues and to whom.

Prioritization:

Establish which incidents take the most priority and which level technician should manage the most important ones. Incidents should be allotted relying upon the degree they will impact the business.

Having well-established protocols ensures everyone is on a similar page, gives consistency over the organization, and extends responsibility among NOC staff. Having the right people and processes set up a more reliant foundation.

Hybrid cloud is the foundation for dynamic delivery

A powerful platform, for instance, a hybrid cloud is an engaging operator for the dynamic delivery model. Hybrid cloud is compliance with tools and technologies to streamlines:

• Virtual collaborations
• Digital project management
• Automation
• Knowledge management processes.

Hybrid cloud can help address security limits too – it allows various applications to run and data to be stored in line with the security, regulatory, and administration conditions. Enterprises can take action on their cloud transition dynamically using Hybrid cloud tools. There are some pre-settings that can accept minimum downtime levels. Tools will help to avoid silos and handle legacy systems.

The Hybrid cloud also allows public and private clouds. And on-premises IT to interoperate continuously using standard technology interfaces. For example – Kubernetes, Linux, and Open Container Initiative.

These technology interfaces help companies to progress with agility and at scale while improving responsiveness and chopping down costs regardless of the growing complexities.

Best Free and Open Source Monitoring Tools for Your Networks:

Picking the right network monitoring solution for your enterprise isn’t easy. IT specialists and bosses need to think about a couple of factors while picking solutions for their business, for instance, security, compatibility, simple-to-use, and (clearly) budget plan. Enterprise-grade tech solutions are typically observed as expensive, yet is that always the case? Not so much! There are a couple of free and open-source network monitoring tools that your business needs to consider while picking a network monitoring solution.

That is the reason we have listed the top free and open-source network monitoring tools. These tools are either allowed to install and use, or delivered under an open-source license. They should be thought of it – if your enterprise needs to limit costs. Yet, we should note that they may not be the best fit for your company.

Some trimmed-down versions are available in the sets of free network monitoring equipped programs. And many of the open-source developments need some technical knowledge or developer expertise.

In this manner, we’ve listed a segment of the noteworthy feature of each free and open-source tool so you know what each solution has some skill in.

AppNeta PathTest

PathTest is a free capacity testing tool that will give you the most exact results possible. PathTest gives you a perception of the true maximum capacity of your network, a testing tool for layer 3 and layer 4 execution, and extended, accurate testing beyond some other tool available today.

Cacti

For a complete network diagramming solution Cacti is an ideal solution. It harnesses the power of RRDTool’s data storage and charting representation. Fast poller, advanced outline templating, different data acquisition steps, and client management are some of the highlights of this Cacti. All of this is encompassed by an intuitive, easy to use interface that looks good for LAN-size installations to complex networks with a large number of tools.

EventSentry Light

EventSentry Light is the freeware version of EventSentryand the successor to EventwatchNT that allows you to review EventSentry for an unlimited time. The Light version still features a comparable event log monitoring capabilities as the full version. So your enterprise can accumulate and decipher data from sign-ins on devices related to your network. System health, service, performance issues and hardware failures are also can be monitored using this tool.

Famatech Advanced IP Scanner

Famatech’s Advanced IP Scanner is a free network monitoring tool that gives an analysis of LAN networks and devices. Advanced IP Scanner allows you to scan for devices on your network and remotely control connected computers and nodes. You can switch computers off from the tools if you realize that the device isn’t being utilized and is utilizing significant resources. The tool partners with Famatech’s Radmin solution for remote IT management, so you can manage IPs from wherever.

Icinga

One of the open-source network monitoring tools that assess network availability and performance in the best way is – Icinga. Through a web interface, your enterprise can watch hosts and applications over your entire network infrastructure. The tool is locally scalable and can just be configured to work with such a device. There is also a modest pack of Icinga modules for specific monitoring capabilities, for instance, monitoring for VMWare’s vSphere cloud environment and business process modeling.

LibreNMS

LibreNMS is an open-source network monitoring system that uses a couple of network protocols to observe every device on your network. The LibreNMS API can retrieve, manage, and graph the data it assembles and supports level-wise scaling to grow its monitoring capacities near to your network. The tool incorporates a versatile alerting system that is altered to communicate with you through the method that works best for your company. They offer native iOS and Android applications moreover.

LogRhythm NetMon Freemium

LogRhythm NetMon Freemium is a free version of LogRhythm NetMon that gives a similar enterprise-grade packet capturing and analysis capabilities as the full version. For this version, there are limits on packet storage and data processing. The freemium still allows customers to perform network threat location and response capabilities based on data packet analysis. It also gives a comparative network threat alerting system as the full version, allowing you to keep up-to-date on your network’s performance and security.

Nagios Core

Nagios Core is a free network monitoring tool expected as the basis for other monitoring and alerting software offered by Nagios. It is primarily a performance check tool that plans and executes checks for network performance over the entire infrastructure. As the event processor for performance checks used by various Nagios software, Nagios Core is also prepared to expand its abilities with independent add-ons via the Nagios Exchange.

Looking for a solution to help you in improving your network performance? Our Network Operations Center Design – contains Best NOC Practices on the top network performance monitor vendors, as well as questions you need to ask vendors and yourself before buying.