What is Infrastructure Monitoring?
Today more than ever, consumers rely on technology for their communication, work, and entertainment. This means any downtime for these services imposes a high cost for software companies. In 2021, Meta lost nearly $100 million in revenue during a disastrous six-hour outage, and it also lost numerous users who left for X (formerly Twitter), Discord, and other social media alternatives.
Infrastructure monitoring tools allow businesses to maintain an exceptional and stable customer experience. These tools can diagnose, fix, and optimize all components of your infrastructure, including containers, physical servers, internet of things (IoT) devices, network devices, databases, and storage.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of infrastructure monitoring tools for your organization and what to look for in these tools. Then, we’ll introduce one of the best infrastructure monitoring tools on the market.
The Importance of Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring is crucial to the performance of your infrastructure, as it ensures the availability, optimization, and security of your assets as you meet customer demand.
With the average cost of downtime reaching hundreds of thousands (on the low end) to millions of dollars, security teams can’t afford to stay in the dark about the overall health of their infrastructure. Infrastructure monitoring tools perform the following key tasks:
- Alert teams of potential issues, minimizing downtime and the risk of critical failures
- Provide historical analysis, helping organizations make informed decisions about resource allocation, energy consumption, and hardware usage
- Identify unusual or suspicious activities within the infrastructure, aiding in the early detection of security threats and vulnerabilities
Infrastructure monitoring also offers a bird’s-eye view of your infrastructure, helping teams troubleshoot issues quickly and improve mean time to repair (MTTR).
Considerations when Choosing an Infrastructure Monitoring Tool
Selecting the best infrastructure monitoring tool requires thoroughly assessing various crucial factors. Consider the following when choosing an infrastructure monitoring tool for your business:
Scalability and compatibility
- Ensure the tool can adapt to the growing needs of your organization.
- Check if the tool supports your entire infrastructure or tech stack, whether it’s hosted in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.
Ease of use and cost efficiency
- Choose a user-friendly platform with an intuitive interface that is easy to set up and configure.
- Evaluate total cost of ownership, maintenance costs, and return on investment (ROI).
Alerting, reporting, and customization
- Prioritize robust alerts and customizable graphical reports.
- Check if you can tailor the infrastructure monitoring tool to your needs.
The Pros and Cons of Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
Although infrastructure monitoring tools help teams ascertain overall system health, pinpoint errors, and improve systems, these tools have pros and cons. Examining the merits and shortcomings of infrastructure monitoring tools will help you select one that suits your business’s needs.
Pros
- Optimizes infrastructure performance based on real-time data.
- Analyzes historical data for trends and performance improvements.
- Creates valuable resources for troubleshooting and technical documentation.
Cons
- Setting up and managing infrastructure monitoring tools can be complex, expensive, and time-consuming.
- Infrastructure monitoring tools can consume resources because a lot of planning is needed to successfully deploy them.
- Poorly configured alerts may lead to false positives, alert fatigue, and missed issues.
Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
Below are some of the top infrastructure monitoring tools available.
(in alphabetical order)
- AppDynamics by Cisco
- Falcon LogScale by CrowdStrike
- Datadog Platform by Datadog
- Log Management and Analytics Solution by Dynatrace
- Sematext Monitoring by Sematext
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor by SolarWinds
- Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring by Splunk
- Zabbix 6.4 by Zabbix
AppDynamics by Cisco
San Jose, CA | 1984 | www.cisco.com
AppDynamics, now part of Cisco, provides application performance monitoring solutions. Its platform offers end-to-end visibility into application and infrastructure performance.
Features to highlight
- Real-time monitoring and AI-powered insights.
- Root cause detection and swift troubleshooting.
- Comprehensive monitoring dashboards for visualization.
Key differentiators
- Automatic system optimization and auto-remediation.
- Visibility into your entire infrastructure and the ability to show dependencies.
CrowdStrike® Falcon LogScale™ by CrowdStrike
Austin, TX | 2011 | www.crowdstrike.com
CrowdStrike is known for its cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. Its infrastructure monitoring tool, Falcon LogScale, specializes in log analysis and security event monitoring.
Features to highlight
- Real-time issue detection, search, and alerting.
- Lightning-fast monitoring at affordable pricing.
- Customizable dashboards for visualizing data.
Key differentiators
- Real-time observability, log management, and threat detection capabilities.
- Allows data ingestion of over 1PB per day without any negative impact on performance.
Datadog Platform by Datadog
New York | 2010 | www.datadoghq.com
Datadog is a renowned name in the world of infrastructure monitoring. Its platform offers comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and alerting for cloud-scale applications.
Features to highlight
- User-friendly interface to enable easy adoption across teams.
- Ease of deployment and integration with over 500 technologies.
- Real-time infrastructure monitoring and one-click troubleshooting.
Key differentiators
- Custom metric (such as customer behavior) tracking with the API or DogStatsD.
- Machine learning that separates real issues from false alarms.
Dynatrace Log Management and Analytics Solution by Dynatrace
Massachusetts | 2005 | www.dynatrace.com
Dynatrace is a leader in the application performance monitoring space. Its platform provides full-stack monitoring and AIOps capabilities.
Features to highlight
- Full-stack visibility and customizable dashboards.
- Automatic analysis of logs and traces in real time.
- Integrations for Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Docker monitoring.
Key differentiators
- Insights into the business implications of events.
- OneAgent SDK that offers custom monitoring capabilities.
Sematext Monitoring by Sematext
Brooklyn, NY | 2010 | www.sematext.com
Sematext provides monitoring and logging solutions for IT operations and application performance management. Its infrastructure monitoring tool, Sematext Monitoring, is a versatile solution that helps organizations gain insights into their infrastructure’s performance and reliability.
Features to highlight
- Swift and seamless onboarding process.
- Log management and analysis that provide insights into infrastructure health.
- Regular process monitoring to uncover anomalies and improve performance.
Key differentiators
- Integrates into many widely used application stacks, such as MySQL and MongoDB.
- Scans servers for obsolete packages, discrepancies, and deviations.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor by SolarWinds
Austin, TX | 1999 | www.solarwinds.com
SolarWinds is a well-established provider of IT management solutions. Its Server & Application Monitor tool focuses on monitoring the health of servers and applications.
Features to highlight
- Comprehensive server and application performance monitoring.
- Root cause analysis and forecasts that facilitate capacity planning.
- Customizable dashboards that aid data visualization.
Key differentiators
- Carries out infrastructure dependency assessments.
- Offers performance monitoring for Docker containers.
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring by Splunk
San Francisco, CA | 2003 | www.splunk.com
Splunk is well known for its data analytics and monitoring solutions. Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides visibility and insights into infrastructure performance.
Features to highlight
- Real-time analytics from one integrated dashboard.
- A blend of real-time data with historical data to provide context.
- Network outage troubleshooting in Kubernetes to reduce downtime.
Key differentiators
- Automatic Kubernetes monitoring with customizable charts.
- Affordable comprehensive visibility while you scale your applications.
Zabbix 6.4 by Zabbix
Latvia | 2005 | www.zabbix.com
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring solution. The Zabbix platform provides robust infrastructure monitoring capabilities focusing on flexibility and customization.
Features to highlight
- Network and server monitoring in an open-source framework.
- Entire infrastructure stack monitoring from one central platform.
- Alerting and reporting with configurable dashboards.
Key differentiators
- Offers multi-platform support and integrates easily with other apps via its Zabbix API.
- Provides an external vault to secure sensitive information.
