Top 14 Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools & Solutions in 2025. Full Reviews and Side by Side Comparison

As your business grows, so will your infrastructure and the number of applications or services running in it. In other words, forget about any sort of manual monitoring or home-grown scripts or tools if you want to keep your sanity. Whether you need performance metrics, service health and availability status, infrastructure, or application logs, you need a tool that will give you end-to-end visibility into the health of your infrastructure.

In this guide, we will review the best infrastructure monitoring tools, open-source and paid, focusing on their technical capabilities, pros and cons, pricing, and best-fit scenarios to help you make the right choice.

• New to infrastructure monitoring solutions and comparing for first-time adoption? → Start here. 
• Adding a new tool to a multi-stack setup? → Find out how to choose.
• Trying to replace current monitoring software? Transitioning from traditional logging to observability? →  Go to Full tool comparisons.
• Ready to buy? → Go to Sematext’s Recommendation.

Jump to: All tools at a glance | Full tool reviews | Sematext’s SaaS | How to choose

Comparison Summary

Here’s a quick side-by-side view of the best infrastructure monitoring tools we recommend. Scroll horizontally to see the full comparison.

Tool	Agent/ Agentless	Resource Consumption	Log Correlation	ML/ Anomaly Detection	Data Retention Flexibility	Pricing Model	Price Flexibility	Price Value*
Sematext	Agent	Low	Yes	Some manual work needed	Yes (plan-based)	Metered by host/ container	High	$$
Elastic	Agent	Moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (configurable)	Resource/usage-based	High	$$ – $$$
Prometheus/ Grafana	Agentless/ Agent (optional)	Moderate to high	Via Loki/ third-party	Via plugins, integrations, or add-ons	Partial (needs setup)	Free, open-source	High	$**
Zabbix	Agent/ Agentless	Low to moderate	Yes	Some manual work needed	Yes (plan/self-managed)	Free/OSS or SaaS	High	$ (on-prem), $$–$$$ (Cloud)
Nagios XI	Primarily agentless	Low	Via add-on	Via plugins, integrations, or add-ons	Partial (plan-based)	Per node, perpetual	Medium	$$
Datadog	Agent	Low to moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (plan-based)	Per host/container	High	$$$
New Relic	Agent	Low to moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (per signal)	Data ingest per GB	High	$$–$$$
Dynatrace	Agent	Moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (per signal/module)	Usage-based, modular	High	$$$$
Site24x7	Agent/ Agentless	Low to moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (plan/config)	Per element	High	$$
AppDynamics	Agent	Moderate	Via log integration	Some manual work needed	Partial (plan-based)	Per vCPU	Medium	$$$$
ManageEngine	Primarily agentless	Low to moderate	Via APM plug-in	Very basic	Partial (plan-based)	Per device/sensor	High	$$
Paessler PRTG	Primarily agentless	Low to moderate	Via scripts/ API	Very basic	Partial (plan-based)	Per sensor, subscription	High	$$
SolarWinds	Primarily agent-based	Moderate	Via modules	Very basic	Partial (plan-based)	Per host/device, annual	Medium	$$$
Splunk	Agent	Moderate	Yes	Fully automatic	Yes (usage-based)	Per host	High	$$$$

* Price Value benchmarked on a common scenario focused only on core infrastructure metrics and alerting: 100 servers/hosts (mix of cloud and on-prem), 10 network devices, basic Kubernetes monitoring (one small cluster), 30-day data retention, standard out-of-the-box alerting and dashboards, moderate alert volume, and a need for role-based access (multi-user).

** Self-hosted open source tools have lower direct costs but they require significant internal resources for managing setup and infrastructure. Thus, the TCO (total cost of ownership) is always higher than it appears initially.

Top Infrastructure Monitoring Tools Reviewed

1. Sematext

Sematext Monitoring provides an agent-based infrastructure monitoring solution that brings together metrics and logs in a unified interface. It’s designed to cover both traditional servers and containerized environments, adapting automatically as services scale. Transaction Tracing is being added later this year. Besides infra and application telemetry, you get access to  your full inventory of hosts, pods, containers, container images, processes, and installed packages, making it easier to maintain visibility across dynamic stacks.

Key Features

• Automatic discovery of hosts, containers, Kubernetes pods and services, and logs.
• Metrics and logs correlation in one dashboard for faster root-cause analysis.
• Pre-built charts and alert rules for CPU, memory, disk I/O, network metrics, containers, pods, errors, etc.
• Real-time anomaly detection flags unexpected spikes before they impact your infrastructure.
• Heartbeat alerts notify you immediately whenever an agent or service stops reporting telemetry to Sematext.

Pros & Cons

Sematext’s lightweight agent (~1–2% CPU) deploys in under a minute and auto-discovers running as well as new services and logs, cutting setup time. Unified log-metric views simplify troubleshooting across hybrid stacks. Teams requiring advanced network path analysis or deeper network checks may find its capabilities more basic compared to dedicated network monitoring tools like SolarWinds.

Pricing

Sematext’s pricing model uses usage-based billing per host and container, with three plan tiers. The Basic plan is $2.80 per host per month for one-day retention; Standard starts at $3.60 and offers up to 30 days of data retention; Pro starts at $5.76 and has data retention up to 365 days. All tiers include unlimited users, integrations, and a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

Best for

Sematext will appeal to small and medium sized teams, startups, or organizations’ DevOps teams who are in need of rapid infrastructure visibility without heavy configuration, and are looking for a transparent and cost-effective alternative to providers like Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, or Splunk AppDynamics. It is particularly strong for DevOps teams working with Kubernetes, Docker, or hybrid environments, especially those who want to ship their telemetry to the cloud and not bother dealing with their own observability infrastructure.

2. Elastic Cloud

Elastic delivers the Elastic Stack as a managed or self-hosted service focused on infrastructure telemetry. Its centralized agent framework lets you gather metrics and logs at scale, then leverage Elasticsearch’s search capabilities for ad hoc investigations. The platform’s topology views and high-cardinality storage models enable you to track relationships between hosts, containers, and applications.

Key Features

• Centralized fleet management for Elastic Agents, simplifying large-scale deployment of metrics and log collection.
• High-cardinality indexing lets you filter and aggregate large volumes of telemetry.
• Built-in machine-learning jobs automatically surface unusual patterns, reducing the need for custom alert rules.
• Logical and physical topology maps visualize dependencies between hosts, containers, and services.
• Seamless pivoting from metrics to logs, letting you diagnose issues without flipping between tools.

Pros & Cons

Elastic scales effortlessly across multi-region clusters and offers powerful full-text search alongside time-series analytics. Its ML jobs detect anomalies without manual rule-writing. However, managing Elasticsearch clusters demands operational expertise, and costs grow significantly with large data volumes or long retention.

Pricing

Elastic Cloud Hosted offers managed service plans starting at $99/month (Standard), with Gold ($114), Platinum ($131), and Enterprise ($184) tiers, each adding more features and support. Elastic Cloud Serverless is usage-based, charging separately for compute and storage (e.g., ingest VCUs from $0.14/hour, storage from $0.047/GB/month). Four support tiers are aligned with subscription levels. Pay-as-you-go and prepaid options are available across all major clouds.

Best for

If you manage hybrid or multi-cloud environments and need searchable, high-cardinality infrastructure data with built-in anomaly detection, Elastic is likely a suitable option. It’s a solid choice when you require dependency and topology views without building your own storage back end.

3. Prometheus/ Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana together form a popular open-source stack for infrastructure monitoring. Prometheus collects multi-dimensional metrics via pull-based scraping, while Grafana visualizes those metrics through code-defined dashboards.

Key Features

• Prometheus uses PromQL which helps you define rich, label-based queries and alerts for any infrastructure metric.
• Native service discovery (Kubernetes, Consul, DNS) ensures dynamic workloads are monitored automatically as soon as they come online.
• Local on-disk storage to keep dashboards and alerts running even if your central systems go offline.
• Grafana as Code with JSON/YAML definitions and Git sync lets you version-control your dashboards alongside application code.
• Unified alerting in Grafana consolidates notifications from Prometheus, Loki, and other sources into a single view.

Pros & Cons

This stack gives you full control over metric collection and visualization with no vendor lock-in. Prometheus is lightweight and reliable, while Grafana delivers rich dashboards and alerts. The trade-off is operational overhead: you must manage scaling, high-availability, and storage yourself, and integrate additional back-ends for logs or traces.

Pricing

Both Prometheus and Grafana are free open-source projects. Grafana Cloud offers managed hosting with a free tier and paid plans starting at $19/month, covering defined retention and support.

Best for

Prometheus and Grafana are ideal if you want a customizable, open-source monitoring stack for containerized or microservices-driven infrastructure. If you have the in-house expertise to operate and scale these tools, they’re likely useful—and you avoid per-host fees.

4. Zabbix

Zabbix is an open-source, all-in-one infrastructure monitoring solution that combines agent-based and agent-less data collection. It scales via distributed proxies to span large networks, cloud services, and virtual environments without per-device fees. Built-in preprocessing lets you normalize or enrich incoming data before thresholds and SLA calculations are applied.

Key Features

• Multi-protocol collection (SNMP, IPMI, SSH, agent, log files), capturing metrics across heterogeneous infrastructure.
• Data preprocessing via regex, JSONPath, and CSV transforms enables consistent metrics and simplified alerts.
• Machine-learning baselines and trend prediction automatically adjust alert limits based on historical usage, reducing false positives.
• Business service maps visualize dependencies and SLA impact.
• Distributed proxy architecture lets you monitor remote sites without overloading your central server.

Pros & Cons

Zabbix delivers flexibility without licensing fees per device and scales to tens of thousands of hosts. Its SLA and business-service mapping suit regulated industries. On the downside, setup and customization may require significant initial investment, particularly for distributed, multi-proxy architectures. Compared to commercial SaaS tools, ongoing maintenance and upgrades remain the team’s responsibility, and the interface is less modern than some cloud offerings.

Pricing

The on-premise Zabbix platform is completely free and open source under AGPL v3, with no license or per-device fees. Zabbix Cloud (SaaS) offers seven pricing tiers, starting from $50/month (Nano plan) for 50 new values per second (NVPS) and 10 GB storage, scaling to $5,000/month for large-scale needs (10,000 NVPS). A free trial is available for cloud users.

Best for

Zabbix is a good choice for enterprises or MSPs needing protocol-agnostic, large-scale monitoring with built-in SLA analysis, granular control and multi-tenancy. If you’re comfortable with open-source deployments and want no per-device charges, give this one a second look.

If you’re still undecided whether this is the right tool for you, we also reviewed the best Zabbix alternatives for you to have even more options!

5. Nagios XI

Nagios XI builds on the open source Nagios Core engine to deliver scalable infrastructure and network monitoring through an extensible, multi-tenant platform. It comes with a modern UI, strong multi-tenant capabilities, and thousands of plugins provide visibility into virtually any device or service.

Key Features

• Configuration wizards let you set up host, service, and protocol checks without writing code.
• Bulk host import and auto-discovery detect new servers and devices automatically.
• Automated trending and capacity-planning graphs forecast resource needs based on historical metrics.
• Multi-channel alerting via email, SMS, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
• Extensive plugin ecosystem and open API support thousands of community and custom checks for both common and niche infrastructure components.

Pros & Cons

Nagios XI’s lightweight footprint and flexible plugin architecture make it easy to tailor monitoring to any on-prem or cloud environment. Multi-tenancy and flexible alerting are strengths for MSPs or organizations with segregated teams. On the flip side, its interface feels dated compared to newer SaaS tools, and advanced visualization or high-availability setups often require additional plugins or architectural planning.

Pricing

Nagios XI offers a free edition monitoring up to seven hosts or 100 services at no cost. Paid Standard licenses begin at $2,495 for 100 nodes and scale up to $23,995 for unlimited nodes, each including one year of support. An Enterprise add-on—unlocking capacity-planning reports, SLA dashboards, and bulk management tools—ranges from $4,490 (100 nodes) to $25,990 (unlimited). A Sitewide license for multiple unlimited instances is also available via custom quote.

Best for

Nagios XI is suitable for small to mid-sized IT or MSP teams that need a low-overhead, highly extensible monitoring platform with clear, host-based pricing. If you value no-cost entry for basic checks, a vast community plugin library, and the ability to customize every aspect of your alerting and dashboards, this solution is likely useful.

6. Datadog

Datadog provides SaaS-based infrastructure monitoring with extensive integration support, full-stack visualization, and ML-driven alerts. It supports on-prem, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud environments, providing a unified platform for infrastructure, logs, traces, and security posture.

Key Features

• 900+ vendor-backed integrations, reducing manual instrumentation and speeding time-to-value.
• Tag-based filtering and analytics lets you slice and dice metrics by environment, team, or application.
• AI-powered machine-learning anomaly detection and event correlation to reduce noise.
• Pre-built host and container dashboards offer instant insights into CPU, memory, disk, and network health.
• Easy correlation of metrics with traces and logs.

Pros & Cons

Datadog’s breadth of integrations and intuitive UI minimize manual configuration, accelerating setup and troubleshooting. Its AI features cut down alert noise, but usage-based pricing can become expensive as infrastructure scales, particularly with custom metrics and container workloads. Datadog customers regularly share their stories about surprisingly high bills. Some advanced features (e.g., AIOps, security monitoring) are only available on higher-priced tiers.

Pricing

Datadog’s free tier supports up to five hosts with one-day data retention. The Pro plan is $15 per host per month (annual commitment is required), offering 15-month retention, while Enterprise costs $23–$27 per host depending on billing terms. Container overages and custom metric fees apply, and a 14-day trial is available.

Best for

Datadog is a good choice for cloud-native teams that want a fast, managed observability platform with extensive out-of-the-box integrations and AI-driven insights. It’s likely to benefit large organizations or those undergoing rapid infrastructure changes, and if they are comfortable trading off higher costs for convenience.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our take on Sematext vs Datadog or on the top alternatives to Datadog. 

7. New Relic

New Relic provides a unified infrastructure monitoring service as part of its observability suite, with a single view of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid assets. Under a consumption-based model free of host licenses, it features integrated APM, change tracking, and real-time health visualizations, aiming to simplify troubleshooting across complex environments.

Key Features

• Change-tracking embeds deployment and config-change annotations into host metrics.
• Automap automatically discovers entity relationships between hosts, services, containers.
• Dynamic dashboards, combining blending infrastructure and application data for unified troubleshooting.
• 200+ quickstarts speed onboarding for common cloud providers, container, and on-prem systems.
• Unified UI for on-prem, cloud, and containerized infrastructures.

Pros & Cons

New Relic allows correlation across hosts, applications, and user experience from a single UI, streamlining triage and reducing tool sprawl. Its per-GB ingest pricing eliminates host fees and makes costs predictable. In high-throughput environments, however, ingest fees can accumulate, and its multi-tiered pricing may be difficult to navigate. Some users may find the UI dense and the configuration options complex, especially when compared to single-purpose monitoring.

Pricing

The free tier grants 100 GB of data ingest per month and one full-access user. Beyond that, ingest is $0.35/GB for Standard and Pro tiers. Enterprise contracts add SLAs, extended retention, and priority support under custom pricing.

Best for

New Relic is useful for SRE, DevOps, or operations teams managing complex, multi-cloud environments, especially where infrastructure monitoring needs to scale with usage and correlate closely with application and user telemetry. You should give it a try if you need flexible, consumption-based pricing, without host licensing.

Get a more detailed review from our Sematext vs. New Relic comparison guide. You can also discover even more options in our New Relic alternatives comparison.

8. Dynatrace

Dynatrace delivers autonomous infrastructure monitoring using a single automated agent that instruments hosts, containers, and network components. Its AI-driven engine analyzes all telemetry in context to pinpoint root causes and can trigger remediation workflows. The platform’s closed-loop approach minimizes manual configuration and keeps environments compliant.

Key Features

• OneAgent auto-instruments servers, containers, and network processes with zero manual setup. 
• Davis AI continuously correlates metrics, traces, and logs.
• Grail unified datastore removes storage tiers and schema requirements to simplify queries and retention management.
• AutomationEngine ties detection to remediation scripts and CMDB updates for closed-loop operations.
• Smartscape real-time dependency mapping visualizes infrastructure topology.

Pros & Cons

Dynatrace stands out for its automation, continuous discovery, and explainable AI-driven troubleshooting, which reduces noise and speeds incident response. Its unified agent and data model support seamless correlation, but the platform’s advanced features may be more than required for smaller teams or those with limited budgets. Compared to open-source options, Dynatrace is less customizable beyond provided extensions, but delivers stronger AI capabilities out of the box. Its per-hour usage fees can be expensive at scale. Their target customers are large enterprises with deeper pockets.

Pricing

Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour; Full-Stack (including Kubernetes) is $0.08 per 8 GiB host-hour, and pods are $0.002 per pod-hour. Log analytics incur separate per-GB fees. Discounts apply for annual commitments.

Best for

Dynatrace is suitable for enterprises operating at scale across hybrid and cloud environments, seeking hands-off, AI-driven infrastructure observability with built-in remediation. If you want a single IT monitoring solution that handles instrumentation, analysis, and automation, this IT monitoring tool could be the right choice.

Read a more comprehensive guide on Sematext vs. Dynatrace to learn more about how these two platforms stack up against each other! We also have a comprehensive comparison between all Dynatrace alternatives.

9. Site24x7

ManageEngine Site24x7 is a cloud-native observability suite that covers infrastructure, network, Kubernetes, and on-premises resources via agents and pollers. It brings server performance metrics, synthetic checks, and cloud cost reports into one service. 

Key Features

• Hybrid agents and on-prem pollers collect CPU, memory, disk, and process metrics from servers behind firewalls without exposing them publicly.
• 130+ global synthetic uptime and performance test locations.
• Automated anomaly detection analyzes time-series data and triggers remediation scripts.
• Built-in cloud spend and compliance reporting tracks AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI usage alongside server health, helping you optimize costs.
• Unified dashboards combine server, network, container, APM, and real user monitoring metrics for full-stack visibility in one place.

Pros & Cons

Site24x7’s all-in-one approach removes tool sprawl by bringing infrastructure, synthetic tests, and cloud cost analysis into a single pane, which simplifies troubleshooting across hybrid environments. The automated anomaly detection and self-healing workflows help reduce manual firefighting during incidents. However, the broad feature set and multiple modules can introduce a learning curve, and costs may rise if you enable every monitoring facet across large estates.

Pricing

Site24x7’s free plan monitors up to 50 resources with basic email alerts. The Infrastructure Professional tier begins at €42 ($49) per month (billed annually) for core server and network checks, while Enterprise starts at €625 ($723) per month for advanced features like auto-remediation and custom reports. Alternatively, you can choose per-resource pricing — servers at €2.50 ($2.90) each, network devices at €3 ($3.47), and Kubernetes containers at €0.25 ($0.29) — with separate rates for logs and synthetic tests.

Best for

Site24x7 is likely useful for ITOps and DevOps teams that span on-prem data centers and public clouds and need unified monitoring, synthetic testing, and cost governance in one portal. If you require proactive anomaly detection, self-healing scripts, and end-to-end visibility — from infrastructure through user experience — you could go for this solution. 

If you’re interested in even more options, you could also check out our review of the top Site24x7 alternatives.

10. AppDynamics

Splunk AppDynamics combines infrastructure monitoring with deep application diagnostics and business analytics in a single platform. You gain visibility into CPU, memory, and network alongside transaction-level performance and revenue impact. The platform’s cohesive data model connects server health with user flows and business outcomes in one view.

Key Features

• Unified infra-APM dashboard brings server, container, and application metrics together so you never lose context during troubleshooting.
• Embedded change-tracking annotates host metrics with deployment and configuration changes to show release impacts instantly.
• Dynamic correlation charts automatically link CPU, memory, and network metrics to APM traces and errors for faster RCA.
• Estate-wide health overview displays status of hosts, events, and alerts across on-prem, cloud, and container environments in one view.
• Automap entity discovery builds a real-time topology of hosts, services, and containers without manual mapping.

Pros & Cons

AppDynamics excels at infrastructure and application visibility, making it simple to trace performance issues from host metrics down to individual code-level transactions. Its consumption-based model removes per-host fees and embeds change-tracking directly into visuals, reducing toil for DevOps and SRE teams. On the downside, data-ingest pricing can grow as you track high-volume metrics, and configuring the many available modules may exceed requirements for teams focused solely on infrastructure and may require a steeper learning curve.

Pricing

AppDynamics uses consumption-based billing on data ingestion rather than per-host fees. You receive 100 GB of ingest per month and one full-platform user at no charge. Beyond that, Standard and Pro tiers both bill $0.35 per GB (with Pro adding unlimited full-platform users and commitment options), while Enterprise is custom-priced with advanced security, compliance, and support. An optional Data Plus plan at $0.55 per GB unlocks longer retention and compliance features without any peak-usage surcharges.

Best for

AppDynamics might be a good fit for enterprises and large engineering organizations that need to tie infrastructure health directly to application performance and business outcomes. If you’re on an SRE or DevOps team responsible for hybrid or microservices architectures and you value embedded deployment insights, AppDynamics is likely useful. It’s especially well-suited for environments where change tracking and real-time topology mapping are key to reducing MTTR.

11. ManageEngine

ManageEngine OpManager provides real-time infrastructure monitoring tools for network devices, servers, storage, and virtual environments. It is on-premises focused, supporting agentless monitoring and distributed architectures, with customizable dashboards and extensive vendor support.

Key Features

• Probe-central architecture monitors remote sites even when disconnected from the central server.
• Layer-2 topology maps and 3D rack/floor visualization simplify capacity planning and asset management.
• Agentless polling via SNMP, WMI, and REST APIs covers a wide array of on-prem hardware and software.
• Modular add-ons (NetFlow Analyzer, DPI, Configuration Manager) extend visibility into traffic flows and settings.
• Automated alerts with multi-step escalation and event correlation.

Pros & Cons

OpManager’s clear device-based licensing makes budgeting straightforward, and its topology maps aid capacity planning. It offers rich device and network visualization, robust for distributed networks or data centers. However, compared to SaaS-based IT infrastructure monitoring tools, scaling and remote management require more hands-on administration, and advanced automation features are available in premium editions.

Pricing

A perpetual license starts at $245 for 25 devices, including one year of maintenance. License packs scale to 1,000 devices. Subscription licenses and add-on modules are priced separately, with flexible upgrade paths.

Best for

ManageEngine’s agentless design and on-prem focus are ideal for mid-size to large organizations with strict data sovereignty or network policies. It’s a good choice also for MSPs and IT operations teams managing distributed sites or if you need transparent device billing with rich topology visualizations.

12. Paessler PRTG

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor uses an agentless, sensor-based architecture to monitor network, server, and application metrics from one dashboard. It comes with an extensive library of preconfigured sensors for SNMP, WMI, Ping, HTTP, and more, which you can easily arrange on maps and dashboards. 

Key Features

• 250+ ready-made sensors for common infrastructure protocols, allowing you to begin monitoring without custom configuration.
• Agentless polling reduces deployment overhead by collecting CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics without installing software on every device.
• Interactive network maps and sunburst charts give instant visibility into relationships and sensor health.
• Mobile apps for Android and iOS deliver real-time alerts and dashboards to your phone.
• A RESTful API supports automated sensor provisioning, data exports, and integration with CI/CD or ticketing systems.

Pros & Cons

PRTG’s sensor-based licensing gives you precise cost control, since you pay only for the metrics you actually use, and its agentless model removes the overhead of deploying software on every device. The rich visualization tools and mobile notifications ensure you can see and respond to network or server issues quickly. On the downside, PRTG’s strength in sensor granularity comes at the expense of built-in long-term, high-cardinality time-series storage, and very large deployments may require additional planning around sensor limits and server sizing.

Pricing

PRTG is licensed by sensor count under an annual subscription model. The base package for up to 500 sensors starts at €137 ($158) per month, scaling up to €1,225 ($1,417) per month for 10,000 sensors. A freeware edition supports up to 100 sensors indefinitely, while a 30-day trial unlocks full functionality for evaluation. All subscription tiers include software updates and email support.

Best for

PRTG suits network and infrastructure teams that need granular, device-level metrics without deploying agents. If you manage a diverse mix of SNMP-capable hardware, Windows/Linux servers, and virtual machines and want clear, sensor-based pricing, PRTG is likely useful. It’s especially appropriate when you need rapid setup, detailed topology views, and mobile alerting in predominantly on-prem environments.

13. SolarWinds

SolarWinds Observability delivers a unified SaaS view of self-hosted, on-premises, and cloud infrastructure, with a focus on network, server, and virtualization monitoring. Its cloud-native back end ingests telemetry from hybrid environments, then applies AI-driven health scoring to highlight deviations. You work in a single console that correlates connectivity diagnostics directly with infrastructure health indicators.

Key Features

• NetPath end-to-end path visualization, breaking down latency hop-by-hop to locate network bottlenecks.
• NetFlow traffic analytics shows traffic patterns, top talkers, and bandwidth usage.
• AI-driven dynamic thresholds adapt to shifting baselines automatically, reducing manual tuning.
• Unified dashboards, combining network, host, and cloud metrics.
• Built-in Kubernetes monitoring captures cluster and pod metrics alongside network data for full-stack visibility.

Pros & Cons

SolarWinds Observability is especially strong for network-centric monitoring and hybrid infrastructures, making it effective for organizations with significant on-prem and legacy systems. Its network path and traffic analytics differentiate it from tools focused primarily on cloud or server environments. However, integration depth with newer cloud-native platforms and container ecosystems may lag behind platforms designed from the ground up for these use cases. Per-device billing can escalate in large deployments, and retention windows may be limited by plan.

Pricing

SolarWinds is $12 per device per month (annual billing). Containers count 10:1 and cloud services 3:1 toward device totals, while ICMP-only nodes report for free. A 30-day trial provides full feature access.

Best for

SolarWinds is a good fit for network and ITOps teams that need deep path-and-flow diagnostics alongside host and cloud metrics. Look further into this monitoring solution if your infrastructure spans complex hybrid networks, its unified network-infra view could be particularly valuable.

14. Splunk

Splunk is a real-time, cloud-native tool designed for monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, with a particular focus on dynamic, high-cardinality environments. It leverages streaming analytics for instant metric ingestion, rapid alerting, and deep correlation between infrastructure, application, and business KPIs.

Key Features

• Real-time streaming ingestion processes millions of metrics per second for rapid anomaly detection.
• Metrics-as-code definitions enable versioned monitor and dashboard deployments in your CI/CD pipelines.
• Network Explorer visualizes traffic flows and dependencies across cloud and on-prem infrastructure.
• Dynamic, multi-condition alert rules capture complex failure scenarios while reducing false positives.
• High-density dashboards render billions of metrics without performance degradation.

Pros & Cons

Splunk’s strength is real-time, high-volume metric handling and instant, dynamic alerting, making it suitable for large-scale, cloud-native deployments. High-cardinality support is especially strong for Kubernetes and microservices. However, it is SaaS-only and pricing is per host which, at the rate you can see below, can add up for large infrastructures. Customization and on-premises deployment options are limited compared to open-source tools.

Pricing

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $15 per host per month under the Splunk Observability Cloud. Flexible consumption bundles and combined Observability plans are available, with a 14-day trial.

Best for

Splunk is useful if you’re part of a DevOps, SRE, or IT operations team managing fast-changing, containerized, or microservices-based infrastructure, and for organizations already invested in the Splunk ecosystem seeking unified observability and rapid, automated incident response.

Also read Sematext vs. Splunk and our comprehensive comparison of Splunk alternatives.

So, What Is the Best Tool for Monitoring Your Infrastructure?

At the end of the day, all these infrastructure monitoring tools get the job done. For DevOps teams, the right choice depends on your stack, scale, and the time and budget you can commit. Here are a few factors you should consider and the questions you should ask yourself when looking for the right solution for you:

• Ease of use: So, things like how quickly you can move around the UI? How intuitive is it? How many clicks do you have to perform between getting an alert that something’s wrong and getting to the details of the problem?
• Ease of setup: So, how quickly can you install and configure any agents or anything else through the UI? Can this be automated? Are there out-of-the-box dashboards and alerts or will you have to create those yourself?
• Footprint and impact: So does anything you set up, such as agents, use additional resources like memory and CPU, and if so, how much? Does it slow down your applications or require you to allocate more memory and CPU?
• Cost: How is the platform priced? Per user? Per CPU? Per host? Per pod or container? And what are the rates? Are there annual discounts?
• Support: How are the support people? Do they respond quickly? Are they actually trying to help you or are they constantly trying to actually sell you something? Can you email and chat with them easily, or does that make it difficult?
• Tool quality: Does the solution monitor everything you need? Does it have the integration with the notification service your team uses for alerting? How configurable are the alerts? How about dashboards? Can you easily add and remove users? How easy is it to change plans and see your costs? And so on.

To make it easier, here is a quick guide to help you pick the right one for your scenario:

If you...	...pick this tool
Want free/open-source with strong community and no vendor lock-in	Prometheus & Grafana, Zabbix, Nagios XI
Want SaaS simplicity, rich integrations, and quick setup	Datadog, Site24x7, Elastic Cloud
Need network/device-centric or hybrid IT environments	OpManager, PRTG, SolarWinds Observability
Want strong out-of-the-box dashboards/alerting and lots of integrations	Datadog, Elastic Cloud, Site24x7
Require cost predictability or pay-as-you-go flexibility	Sematext, Site24x7, Elastic Cloud
Need deep Kubernetes or cloud-native support	Prometheus & Grafana, Datadog, Elastic Cloud
Require enterprise multi-tenancy, RBAC, and compliance	Zabbix, Site24x7, Datadog
Need fast setup, low overhead, unified monitoring, and strong log correlation	Sematext, Datadog, Site24x7

Wrap-up

Infrastructure monitoring spans from bare-metal servers to dynamic containers and complex networks. The right tool depends on your scale, budget, preferred deployment model, and integration needs. Assess your infrastructure’s characteristics and monitoring priorities to choose the solution that best aligns with your DevOps and organizational objectives. 

Hopefully, this guide helped you make a decision or at least narrow down a couple of tools you could look into further. 

But if you’re still in a dilemma, give Sematext’s infrastructure monitoring tool a try! Test out everything it has to offer and see for yourself how it can cover all your infrastructure monitoring needs. There’s a 14-day free trial with no-credit card required so that you can easily get set up and start monitoring immediately. And if you run into any issues our support is top notch.

FAQs

What Is IT Infrastructure Monitoring?

IT Infrastructure Monitoring is the process of collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from various components of an organization’s IT environment to ensure systems are healthy, performant, and available. This includes your servers, networks, cloud services, virtual machines, storage devices, containers, and applications.

Infrastructure monitoring helps you detect issues early and enables proactive incident management, capacity planning, compliance enforcement, and overall system reliability. It’s a foundational DevOps best practice that supports observability, automation, and continuous delivery.

Why Monitor Your Infrastructure?

You monitor your infrastructure so you can fix problems before they impact your users—and ideally before they even happen. With the right IT monitoring tool in place, you can:

• Detect and address issues proactively, before they become outages.
• Catch performance slowdowns or resource bottlenecks, and improve application responsiveness.
• Analyze historical trends to forecast future growth, right-size instances, and control costs.
• Maintain logs and metrics for auditing, security, and regulatory purposes, not just troubleshooting.
• Enhance automation and reliability through integrations with orchestration, incident response, and CI/CD systems.

What Is an Infrastructure Monitoring Tool

An Infrastructure Monitoring Tool is a platform or solution that helps DevOps and IT operations teams observe and analyze the performance, availability, and resource usage of their IT infrastructure. Telemetry data—such as metrics, logs, traces, and events—from infrastructure layers, and translate it into actionable insights via dashboards, alerts, and analytics.

They often support a wide range of data sources and deployment models, including on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures. Advanced tools integrate seamlessly with DevOps ecosystems and support features like auto-discovery, dynamic resource tracking, service mapping, anomaly detection, and correlation with application-level performance. This enables faster troubleshooting and more informed decisions across operations and engineering teams.

What to Monitor with Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?

Effective infrastructure monitoring tools should cover a broad range of components and metrics, including:

• Servers and virtual machines: CPU load, memory usage, disk I/O, uptime, OS logs.
• Containers and orchestrators: Container lifecycle, pod health, Kubernetes node metrics, cluster state, resource limits/requests.
• Networks: Bandwidth usage, packet loss, network latency, DNS performance, firewall status.
• Databases: Query performance, connection pool usage, replication lag, disk space.
• Cloud services: VM instances, load balancers, object storage, API response times.
• Applications and services: Uptime, response time, error rates, dependency health.

In addition to raw metrics, modern tools also ingest additional data such as:

• Synthetic transactions: Simulated user transactions from different geographies.
• Real user monitoring (RUM): Frontend performance data from actual user sessions, including page load time and frontend errors. 
• Logs and events: System logs, application logs, audit trails, configuration-change events, security findings, and orchestration events (e.g., Kubernetes Events)

By combining these layers, DevOps teams gain a unified observability platform that drives faster feedback loops, stronger SLAs, and continuous reliability.

 

Images: courtesy of brands.

 

Author Bio

Ehab Qadah

Ehab has extensive experience in software engineering and technical leadership roles for over ten years. His main interests involve large-scale back-end development, microservices architecture, cloud infrastructures/DevOps, distributed systems, data engineering, technical writing, and people management. Ehab holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Bonn, Germany and he is currently leading the R&D team at Alma Health (UAE-based healthcare startup).