Fortunately, the tools to make that process easier are numerous and mature.

We may earn affiliate commissions from buying links, which help support our testing.

We put top network management packages through their paces to see how they handle these challenges.

Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold strikes an excellent balance between visual pizzazz and the ability to track common network devices.

While the extensible plugins arent as freely available as with some competitors, the core product more than makes up for this in most cases.

As long as you understand what kind of infrastructure you need to monitor and you dont mind the licensing structure, PRTG is a powerful and even user friendly product.

While the feature set can be a bit overwhelming, IT pros will find it hard to run out of options.

If your devices are geographically distributed and all your sites have internet connectivity, then its hard to find a solution better than Logic Monitor.

For smaller networks that could be walled off from the internet, you will need to look elsewhere.

Starting at 1.995 for Standard Edition, 3,495 for Enterprise Edition.

If flexibility and extensibility are what youre after in a network monitoring tool, then Nagios XI is the way to go.

An easy agentless model and an unlimited number of targets are only slightly marred by a lack of design flash.

NetCrunch is beautiful and feature-rich, but it hasnt fully adopted the web-based interfaces used by nearly every other product out there.

While some ability to view the network status is in place in the browser, true remote management is currently out of reach without installing a fat client.

Datadog is a very good network and service monitoring service for midsized IT shops.

If you can get past the initial setup and the agent-based architecture, its got a lot to offer, including loads of integrations, dashboards, and flexible alerts.

Idera Uptime Infrastructure Monitor gets a lot of things right and youll certainly find most of the features youll need in a network and device management tool.

But its tendency towards complexity and a hard push toward using agents might bother some.

Vallum Halo Manager is an inexpensive tool that could work on elementary networks.

However, if you need to be proactive and have more in-depth insight into a larger network, youll need to look elsewhere.

Youre busy sleeping, so you dont find out about it until your users get in at 8:00 to raise the hue and cry.

By the time you get in, your boss is frothing and youre looking for somewhere to hide.

And, no, this hasnt gotten easier now that were all working from home due to the pandemic.

If anything, its become more difficult, since youll need to find out about problems and solve them, all without setting foot inside your data closet.

Internet Connectivity Monitor For Mac