13 Best System Monitoring Tools in 2025

A system is “a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole”. So when we say System Monitoring Tools we mean tools/solutions/software that you can use to monitor various aspects of your complete product or service – from monitoring user-facing “frontend” to data stores in the backend and, of course, applications and services that sit between them.

Needless to say, you can forget about trying to monitor all this manually or using home-grown scripts or tools and do it at scale and cheaply. Today’s systems are far too complex for that. There are whole companies with large teams dedicated to building great system monitoring software.

In this article, we provide a review of 13 such System Monitoring Tools that are among the best monitoring tools available today.

Why Do You Need a System Monitoring Tool?

Effective system monitoring isn’t just a luxury—it’s an essential part of any robust IT infrastructure. A high-quality system monitoring tool gives you complete visibility into your IT environment, ensuring that critical systems, applications, and networks perform optimally.

While this is not an exhaustive list, here are some of the things you can do with a good system monitoring solution and why you will want to have it:

• Ensure Uptime and Performance: Quickly identify issues – typically with your websites, web applications, or APIs (whether yours or from third parties you depend on) before they become major outages, preventing costly downtime.
• Optimize Resource Usage: Spot inefficiencies or bottlenecks like servers whose CPUs are frequently maxed out or Kubernetes pods that are getting OOM killed because they were not given sufficient memory, allowing you to allocate resources wisely and improve system efficiency.
• Cost reduction: This is Similar to the above, but “inversed” – spot overprovisioned infrastructure, rightsize it, and reduce your costs.
• Enhance Security: Detect unusual activities or unauthorized access attempts, such as repeating login failures, improving your security posture by alerting your team to potential breaches.
• Proactive Issue ResolutionPrevention: Predict potential problems through historical analysis of metrics, logs, and other operations data, enabling preventative actions rather than reactive troubleshooting.
• Compliance and Reporting: Automatically generate reports demonstrating system health and compliance, easing regulatory audits and internal reviews. Or simply keeping your superiors informed. 🙂 

Top System Monitoring Software

Below are the pros, cons, and pricing of the best system monitoring tools 2025 that we reviewed.

Before we proceed, here’s how these tools compare at a glance:

Tool	Key Features	Pricing
Sematext	Lightweight agent, 100+ integrations, logs & metrics correlation, easy onboarding	Starts at $2.8/month per host
SolarWinds	Extensive templates, server & app performance monitoring, capacity forecasts	Starts at ~$45,000/year (200 nodes)
Datadog	850+ integrations, customizable dashboards, full-stack observability, anomaly detection	Starts at $18/month per host
Dynatrace	AI-driven anomaly detection, full-stack monitoring, automated root-cause analysis	Starts at ~$28.8/month per host
Site24x7	AI-powered monitoring, extensive plugins, intuitive mobile dashboards	Starts at $9/month (practical: $35/mo)
PRTG Network Monitor	Agentless monitoring, auto-discovery, intuitive dashboards	Starts at $1,750/year (500 sensors)
ManageEngine	Real-time analytics, customizable dashboards, network and app monitoring	Starts ~$95/year (10 devices)
Nagios XI	Highly customizable, community plugins, extensive integrations	Starts at $2,495 (100 nodes, standard)
Zabbix	Open-source, agent-based/agentless, extensive visualization	Free, open-source
NinjaOne	Endpoint & patch management, automated remediation, comprehensive asset management	~$3.60/month per endpoint (min. 50)
New Relic	Full-stack observability, distributed tracing, extensive integrations, anomaly detection	Starts at $49/user per month
AppDynamics	Infrastructure mapping, workload optimization, anomaly detection	Starts at $7/vCPU/month
SigNoz	OpenTelemetry support, unified metrics/logs/traces, active community	Starts at $199/month (unlimited users)

#1 Sematext

Sematext Cloud is a monitoring platform available as a SaaS whose individual monitoring solutions can be used together or independently. One of those solutions is Sematext Monitoring and it is focused on the monitoring of the infrastructure and applications and services running on that infrastructure, including databases. At a glance, with Sematext, you get valuable insight into the health status of your system by centrally monitoring applications, servers, container,s and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Nomad, various system events, inventory of packages, servers, container images, databases, processes, and more. 

The Agent is super lightweight. The service offers more than 100 integrations for popular applications and frameworks, such as Apache Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JVM, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, MongoDB, and more. 

Integrations with leading system alerting services like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps) … and, of course, Slack… can also be used with the Sematext platform, so you’ll never miss a beat.

Pros

• Really affordable – see pricing below
• 100+ integrations for popular application stacks, such as Apache Cassandra, MySQL, Apache Spark, MongoDB, and more
• Quick onboarding because of all the out-of-the-box dashboards and alerts. Some dashboards even teach you about the metrics they show.
• A lightweight agent
• Ability to monitor both metrics and logs, as well as events, plus the ability to correlate them
• Collects server inventory and monitors for deviations, discrepancies, and obsolete packages
• Process monitoring, which tells you which processes/applications/services are the most CPU or memory-hungry

Cons

• No transaction tracing support (it’s WIP)
• No full-featured profiler

Pricing

• 14-day free trial without credit card available
• Paid plans start at $2.8 per month per host

#2 SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

SolarWinds provides a comprehensive suite of system management tools designed to monitor applications, servers, virtual hosts, storage performance, and other resources, ensuring visibility into system health and performance across both on-premises and cloud environments. 

The platform offers over 1,200 out-of-the-box templates for various applications and systems, facilitating quick deployment and efficient monitoring. It supports a wide range of integration protocols, including WMI, SNMP, PowerShell, and REST API, enhancing its adaptability to diverse IT infrastructures.

Pros

• Server monitoring and cross-stack monitoring data correlation
• Analytics tools for understanding monitoring metrics (e.g., insights into anomalies)
• Capacity charts and forecasts that aid with long-term capacity planning
• Monitors overall server and application performance, uptime, and hardware issues
• Monitors performance metrics, such as CPU, memory, and uptime for Docker containers
• Visualization of data in easy-to-use dashboards
• End-to-end monitoring support with correlated metrics
• Automatic service discovery and application dependency mapping

Cons

 

• Steep pricing for SMBs
• Overlapping capabilities with other SolarWinds tools
• No anomaly detection for alerts
• No support for identity federation with LDAP
• Generic and limited reporting filters in the dashboard
• Doesn’t provide end-to-end visibility
• Some users reported configuration difficulties
• Some users reported challenges with scalability and performance in complex setups, making instance management intricate.
• Some users reported that the UI needs improvement

Pricing

• 30-day free trial available
• Paid plans are not publicly available (talk with sales required), but a reseller license starts at a hefty price of +$45,000/year for 200 nodes + 1st-year maintenance

#3 Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that provides real-time visibility into the performance of applications, infrastructure, and networks. It supports over 850 integrations, facilitating comprehensive monitoring across diverse environments. 

The platform enables users to collect, search, filter, and analyze logs and metrics, offering actionable insights into system health and aiding in rapid troubleshooting.

The number of solutions offered is a bit overwhelming. Each solution has a different pricing model, but that is the nature of today’s monitoring platforms in general. The onboarding is reasonably straight forward, though the UI has a ton of “knobs”, so you’ll need a good amount of time to figure it all out. The service is on the expensive side, to put it mildly, as made evident through numerous complaints about that on Reddit and other places.  

Pros

• Covers all relevant infrastructure monitoring parameters (metrics, logs, security, etc.)
• Customizable integrations with Datadog API
• Visualization of connected infrastructure components through host map feature
• Customizable dashboards for displaying key insights about your infrastructure health
• Support for log aggregation and analytics
• Support for anomaly detection and alerts
• Support for custom metrics
• Over 850 native integrations
• Support for hybrid environments
• Full-stack observability platform

Cons

• Expensive. User reports that “Once you got onto Datadog (a closed platform), they will leverage switching cost to squeeze you”
• Complex to use; can be overwhelming for new users
• Limited log analytics due to lack of support for JSON log processing
• No overage protection
• Some users reported difficult-to-understand documentation
• Doesn’t have many pre-built dashboards

Pricing

• 14-day free trial available for all solutions
• Free plan available for 1-day retention, up to 5 hosts
• Paid plans start at $18 per month per host for 15 months retention

We took a detailed look at Datadog’s pricing given all the comments by their customers about how expensive it is. It turns out the comments are right, Datadog is for customers with deep pockets. Here is a short video comparing Datadog costs to Sematext costs. 

#4 Dynatrace 

Dynatrace is an all-encompassing monitoring solution that delivers insights into infrastructure across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups. It observes components such as virtual machines, storage, networks, servers, Kubernetes clusters, and host systems. Data gathering is simplified with the deployment of a single agent per host, termed OneAgent, which oversees servers, applications, services, databases, and more. For infrastructure-centric monitoring, OneAgent can be set to operate in infrastructure-monitoring mode. ​

Dynatrace provides versatile deployment methods: you can install the stack within your hybrid cloud or opt for their hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The platform facilitates monitoring of CPU, memory, storage, network interface card (NIC) metrics, host processes, network health, and virtualization platforms like VMware. ​

Pros

• Available in both on-premises and cloud versions​
• Unified platform supporting infrastructure, application performance, business analytics, and cloud automation​
• AI-driven anomaly detection and notifications​
• The AI engine, Davis, autonomously pinpoints the root causes of performance issues​
• Offers customizable dashboards for swift and targeted visualization​
• Custom monitoring extensions using OneAgent SDK​
• Automatically detects and maps dependencies​
• Simplified agent management​
• Compatible with virtualized environments​
• Comprehensive full-stack observability platform

Cons

• Very steep pricing for SMBs
• Complex to use, with additional training required
• Lagging documentation for the latest features released
• Some users reported “very cumbersome” Dynatrace query language

Pricing

• 15-day free trial is available
• Paid plans start at $0.04 per hour for any host size. Using quick math, that means you’ll be paying 0.04 * 24 * 30 per host per month, equaling $28.8 per host per month.

To illustrate, Sematext Infrastructure monitoring starts at $2.8 per month per host on a starter plan.Ch eck out a detailed comparison of Sematext vs Dynatrace. We also have a comprehensive comparison between all Dynatrace alternatives.

#5 Site24x7 Server Monitoring

​Site24x7 is a comprehensive agent-based system monitoring solution that provides real-time tracking of servers, networks, containers, websites, applications, virtualization platforms, Docker hosts, and Kubernetes clusters. It supports deployment both on-premises and in the cloud. 

The platform’s dashboards offer visualizations of network information, application activity, and server metrics, delivering immediate insights into system health. Additionally, Site24x7 allows for the extension of its built-in monitoring capabilities through custom plugins written in languages such as Shell, PowerShell, Batch, VB, and Python.

Pros

• AI-powered performance infrastructure monitoring capabilities
• 60+ performance metrics for servers
• Self-hosted outside the subscriber’s data center
• Supports tracking changes on the server’s ports, directories, and syslogs
• Automated discovery, mapping, and monitoring of network devices
• Intuitive dashboard accessible via mobile and desktop
• Uptime monitoring 
• Customizable alerts & flexible notification configurations based on specific thresholds
• Monitors applications, logs, virtual systems, and network devices
• 100+ plugin integrations for applications like MySQL and Apache

Cons

• Complex manual setup; lack of automation
• Difficult to add custom plugins
• Users reported difficulties with report customization
• Users reported the tool as being non-intuitive and difficult to use

Pricing

• “Forever free plan” available
• Paid plans start at $9/month, but to get a somewhat comprehensive feature set, the $35/month plan is required

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Site24x7.

#6 PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor is a system monitoring tool that covers applications, databases, networks, servers, and virtual machines. It offers you both agent-based and agentless monitoring and can be installed locally or hosted.

With PRTG’s dashboard, you get a centralized and consolidated view of alerts, outages, and warnings. Sensors intuitively track all the system elements involved in specific business processes. PRTG’s infrastructure monitoring tool detects bottlenecks to optimize system capacity.

Pros

• Simple and quick setup
• Network and its connected components are automatically visualized by map designer
• Ready-to-use and user-built reports to highlight performance issues
• Flexible alerts delivered across multiple channels

Cons

• No native support for Linux
• Licensing model (based on sensors) can be costly at scale

Pricing

There is a 30-day free trial, after which prices start at $1,750 for 500 sensors. PRTG also offers a perpetual payment license with a renewable maintenance and support plan.

7. ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine is a suite of enterprise-grade system monitoring and management software for real-time monitoring of networks, physical and virtual servers, endpoints (desktops, mobile devices, etc.), storage devices, applications, and more. With customizable dashboards and over 200 performance widgets, ManageEngine gives you a comprehensive view of overall system performance, along with smart alerts for quick root-cause analysis and self-healing automated actions.

With Applications Manager, you get real-time visibility into web application performance and UX across multi-cloud environments, including synthetic monitoring of business-critical transactions, monitoring/troubleshooting of physical and virtual server health and performance, container and database monitoring, and more.

Pros

• Automated and dynamic discovery and mapping of dependencies
• Advanced analytics, with 500+ pre-built reports
• Process and system health monitoring through SNMP/WMI/CLI
• Agentless monitoring for VMware and WMI-based monitoring for Hyper-V

Cons

• Optimized for network monitoring, with little support for other system components
• No hosted version

Pricing

ManageEngine offers a 30-day free trial and a free version for up to three devices. Pricing is tiered by feature bundle and number of devices: Standard ($245 for 10 devices), Professional ($345 for 10 devices), and Enterprise ($11,545 for 250 devices).

#8 Nagios XI

​Nagios XI is an enterprise-level monitoring solution built upon the open-source Nagios Core, designed to oversee servers, applications, and network devices. It offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities, including performance metrics, application health, and network traffic analysis. 

Data collection is facilitated through agents deployed on network elements and monitored components, with support for protocols like SNMP and WMI for agentless monitoring. The platform provides customizable dashboards and extensive visualization tools, enhancing system health insights. Its flexibility and scalability make it suitable for various enterprise environments, though initial setup and customization may require a learning curve. 

Pros

• Support for network-related components like routers, switches, and other physical hardware
• Highly customizable; supports custom metrics
• Active user community
• One of the most mature monitoring solutions on the market with a user-friendly GNU GPL license.
• Alerts with escalation capabilities inform 
• Scripting API allows you to monitor virtually anything
• Nagios XI includes capacity planning for your Ubuntu machines, powerful data visualization, configuration wizard, and infrastructure management.
• Extensible architecture through plugins
• Automated remediation capabilities through event handlers

Cons 

• Limited set of default dashboards
• Users reported a complex initial setup with a steep learning curve
• Maintenance and operational overhead
• Users reported high licensing cost 

Pricing

• Free, open-source version (Nagios Core) available with limited features
• Free trial available for all Nagios products
• Paid plans start at $2,495 for a 100-node license for the standard edition. Enterprise edition is an additional $1,995. An unlimited node license is available for $23,995

#9 Zabbix

​Zabbix is an enterprise-class, open-source monitoring solution that enables real-time tracking of various components within an IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, virtual machines, cloud services, applications, and databases. 

It collects, aggregates, and analyzes metrics to provide comprehensive insights into system performance and health. The platform offers extensive visualization options, such as real-time graphing and customizable dashboards, facilitating effective monitoring and analysis. 

Zabbix supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring, utilizing protocols like SNMP, IPMI, JMX, and SSH to gather data. Its flexible notification mechanisms allow for timely alerts via email, SMS, or other methods, ensuring prompt responses to potential issues. 

Additionally, Zabbix features auto-discovery functions for detecting network devices and components, streamlining the monitoring setup process. 

Pros

• Lightweight agent with a small footprint centrally managed from the Zabbix server
• Broad support for all relevant infrastructure components
• Open source with strong community and commercial support
• Easy integration with external applications via Zabbix API
• Single-pane visibility into infrastructure through configurable dashboards, graphs, and reports

Cons

• Complex initial deployment and configuration setup
• Requires a database server setup to store configurations
• Can consume substantial system resources in large environments
• Lacks some capabilities found in commercial tools
• Documentation sometimes lacks detail and clarity
• UI/UX needs improvements for better usability
• Difficult procedures for backing up and migrating between versions

Pricing 

• Free open-source tool. Zabbix also offers different tiers of technical support based on your use case.

#10 NinjabOne

NinjaOne is an agent-based SaaS solution tailored for remote monitoring and management (RMM) of networks, endpoints, software, and system resources. Designed for IT service providers and internal IT departments, NinjaOne offers powerful monitoring capabilities coupled with automation to simplify IT operations.

NinjaOne automatically scans networks to log all connected devices and apps and maintain full hardware and software inventories. Its modules include a network traffic monitor as well as device status and resource usage supervisors. It also standardizes and automates device deployment, configuration, management, and remediation processes.

Pros

• Ticketing system supports well-managed coordinated incident responses
• End-to-end centralized system monitoring with customized threshold-based alerts
• Monitors and secures endpoints, including a managed antivirus solution
• Cloud-native automated OS patching for Windows, Linux, and MacOS endpoints, as well as for 135+ applications
• Automatically detect and resolve system anomalies
• Offers comprehensive asset management 
• Bespoke customer support
• Feature-rich mobile app 

Cons

• Users reported scripting options not being straightforward
• Complex UI
• Users report steep learning curve
• Users reported patching issues

Pricing

• Free trial available
• Paid plans are not publicly available. You have to contact NinjaOne’s support. Some sources report that the pricing is $3.60 per endpoint per month with a minimum commitment of 50 endpoints with 60 60-day termination notice. That’s a minimum of $180 per month for 3 months minimum. 

To put it into perspective, Sematext charges $2.8 per host per month without minimum obligations and a minimum number of hosts. For 50 hosts (endpoints), you’ll pay $140 per month.

#11 New Relic

​​New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform that provides full-stack monitoring, offering visibility into the performance of your infrastructure components, both on-premises and in the cloud. 

It consolidates data from logs, infrastructure, applications, and serverless functions into a single interface, facilitating real-time health monitoring of key host metrics such as CPU, memory, disk usage, and network status. 

New Relic’s Insights feature allows for easy tracking and querying of infrastructure monitoring data, with dashboards that are automatically generated upon new infrastructure integrations, expediting the process of gaining actionable insights. 

Pros

• Ability to debug service-side performance issues from the tool interface
• Consistency for infrastructure monitoring across hybrid platforms
• End-to-end visibility through distributed tracing
• Support for correlated metrics
• Proactive anomaly detection and alerts
• 700+ integrations available
• Robust APM capabilities
• Comprehensive, customizable dashboards
• Easy-to-use interface
• SOC2 compliant with US and EU data centers

Cons

• Complex pricing for the platform – per user, per computing, etc. It’s a major PITA to figure out how much things will end up costing you in the end. See below for just a taste of that.
• Complex UI
• Steep learning curve
• Feature complexity may overwhelm small businesses

Pricing

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $49/user for Core and $10/first user + $99/additional user for Full platform users

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs New Relic.

#12 Splunk AppDynamics

AppDynamics offers an extensive infrastructure monitoring solution covering servers, storage systems, and network components across cloud-native and hybrid setups.

The platform can be deployed either on-premises or accessed through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. AppDynamics emphasizes avoiding downtime by associating user experiences and business outcomes directly with infrastructure-related events.

With comprehensive full-stack monitoring, AppDynamics effectively links application performance issues to underlying infrastructure bottlenecks, significantly speeding up root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Its server monitoring capability provides a clear logical visualization of server infrastructure, encompassing everything from data center layouts to rack structures, and from CPU performance to memory, network activity, and disk utilization. Additionally, its storage monitoring module supports NetApp solutions, helping identify performance bottlenecks related to databases and storage irregularities.

Pros

• Proactive intelligent workload optimization to enhance performance
• Comprehensive metric collection and correlation across infrastructure components
• Detailed dashboards and metrics focused specifically on server monitoring
• Configurable health rules and automated policies for anomaly detection and issue remediation
• Seamless integration with incident management and alerting platforms such as ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Jira
• Direct correlation between application performance and infrastructure (server and network) metrics
• Automated anomaly detection with proactive alerts
• Business-centric observability platform providing insightful capacity-planning recommendations

Cons

• Expensive and very much aimed at very large enterprises
• No free trial available
• No automation for agent installation and configuration
• Complex configuration and a lot of effort required to separate information from noise
• Steep learning curve for advanced features
• Inadequate tutorials and documentation
• Users reported even higher costs for large businesses
• Functionality is overkill for small to medium-sized businesses

Pricing

• Paid plans start at $7 per vCPU per month for the Infrastructure Monitoring Edition. But if you need more than just infra, like Database monitoring for example, you’ll have to proceed with the Premium edition with a hefty price of $36 per vCPU per month. Some discounts apply with annual payments.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs AppDynamics.

#13 SigNoz

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform designed to equip developers and operations teams with deep insights into application performance. It leverages native support for OpenTelemetry, allowing the unified collection and analysis of metrics, logs, and traces, thereby streamlining the monitoring and troubleshooting of distributed systems.

Pros

• Unified view combining metrics, logs, and traces for efficient monitoring
• Broad compatibility across various programming languages and frameworks
• Pre-built charts and visualizations highlighting essential metrics like p99 latency, error rates, and request rates
• Ability to trace user requests across different services using flame graphs and Gantt charts
• Centralized log management powered by ClickHouse
• Active and supportive open-source community
• Compliant with SOC2, HIPAA, and BAA standards

Cons

• As a relatively new entrant into the observability space, it may lack some advanced features and integrations 
• No dedicated support 
• Steep learning curve

Pricing

• 30-day free trial available
• Paid plans start at $199/month for unlimited users + usage-based pricing

What Is the Best System Monitoring Tool for You?

Here are some of the minimum requirements you should look for when choosing a system monitoring software:

• Support for complex environments: Your system monitoring tool must be able to monitor highly distributed applications, ephemeral components, and diverse hosts and devices across multiple public and private clouds and networks.
• Centralized management of metrics and insights: You need a reliable and easy-to-parse picture of system health, performance, and integrity. AI-powered analytics and strong visualizations in a consolidated dashboard can give you this.
• Notifications and alerts: The solution you choose must be able to detect anomalous system behavior anywhere in the stack that is, or could be, detrimental to system performance. It should also be able to notify the right personnel in real time.
• High levels of automation: Your system monitoring tool should be able to automatically open tickets with detailed information on system activities that led to a detected issue, as well as trigger automated workflows that mitigate, or even fix, the problem, such as shutting down a compromised service or deploying a patch. It should also be able to carry out preventive maintenance with little or no human intervention.
• Scalability and flexible pricing: Your solution should make it easy for you to scale up or down in response to dynamic system requirements—and to adjust pricing accordingly.

• Reporting: To help with budget and capacity planning, as well as compliance auditing, choose a tool that comes with a set of informative historical and real-time reports. Since every system is different, these reports should be customizable.

Conclusion

Today’s complex IT environments consist of intertwined layers of infrastructure and firmware, applications and services, and user software. Each layer generates its own metrics, which makes it critical to have good system monitoring tools, such as Sematext, in place. That way, everybody wins. Customers, employees, and partners will enjoy high-performing and always-available apps; DevOps will be able to debug and remediate system performance issues quickly and efficiently; security will rest easy knowing that all system assets and their dependencies are visible and properly configured, and lines of business will get maximum ROI on their products and services.

To see for yourself how Sematext’s industry-leading system performance monitoring software can help your organization, start a free trial today.

You might also be interested in:

• Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
• Best Linux Monitoring Tools
• Best Server Monitoring Software

 

Author Bio

Sunny Srinidhi
Sunny has been working in the data space for over seven years. He writes microservices to work with data at scale and has experience using a variety of databases, including MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Couchbase, Amazon Athena, and Apache HBase. He is currently working on a Customer 360 product that is intelligently unifying customer data from multiple sources at scale.