The following tables compare general and technical information for several network monitoring systems. For more information, please refer to the individual product articles.
Features
Legend
Product name : The name of the software, linked to its Wikipedia article.
IP SLAs reports : Support of Cisco's IP Service Level Agreement mechanism.
Logical grouping : Supports arranging the hosts or devices it monitors into user-defined groups.
Trending : Provides trending of network data over time.
Trend prediction : The software features algorithms designed to predict future network statistics.
Auto discovery : The software automatically discovers hosts or network devices it is connected to.
Agentless : The product does not rely on a software agent that must run on hosts it is monitoring, so that data can be pushed back to a central server. "Supported" means that an agent may be used, but is not mandatory. An SNMP daemon does not count as an agent.
SNMP : Able to retrieve and report on SNMP statistics.
Syslog : Able to receive and report on Syslogs.
Plugins : Architecture of the software based on a number of 'plugins' that provide additional functionality.
Triggers / alerts : Capable of detecting threshold violations in network data, and alerting the administrator in some form.
MIB compilter : Able to read MIB data, to quickly understand what resources are being managed.
Web app : Runs as a web-based application.
* No: There is no web-based frontend for this software.
* Viewing: Network data can be viewed in a graphical web-based frontend.
* Acknowledging: Users can interact with the software through the web-based frontend to acknowledge alarms or manipulate other notifications.
* Reporting: Specific reports on network data can be configured by the user and executed through the web-based frontend.
* Full Control: ALL aspects of the product can be controlled through the web-based frontend, including low-level maintenance tasks such as software configuration and upgrades.
Distributed monitoring : Able to leverage more than one server to distribute the load of network monitoring.
Inventory : Keeps a record of hardware and/or software inventory for the hosts and devices it monitors.
Platform : The platform (Coding Language) on which the tool was developed/written.
Data storage method : Main method used to store the network data it monitors.
License : License released under (e.g. GPL, BSD license, etc.).
Maps : Features graphical network maps that represent the hosts and devices it monitors, and the links between them.
Access control : Features user-level security, allowing an administrator to prevent access to certain parts of the product on a per-user or per-role basis.
IPv6 : Supports monitoring IPv6 hosts and/or devices, receiving IPv6 data, and running on an IPv6-enabled server. Supports communication using IPv6 to the SNMP agent via an IPv6 address.
References