If you’re working as a Linux/Unix system administrator, sure you know that you must have useful monitoring tools to monitor your computers & systems, monitoring tools are very important in the job of a system administrator or a server webmaster, it’s the best way to keep an eye on what’s going on inside your system.
Read Also: 20 Tools to Monitor Linux Performance – Part 1
Today we’re going to talk about another 13 Linux monitoring tool that you may use to do the job.
21. Glances – Real Time System Monitoring
Glances is a monitoring tool built to present as much information as possible in any terminal size, it automatically takes the terminal window size it runs on, in other words, it’s a responsive monitoring tool.
Features
- Licensed under LGPL and written in Python.
- Cross-platform, it works on Windows, Mac, BSD and Linux.
- Available in most Linux official repositories.
- A It gives a lot of information about your system.
- Built using curses.
Read More: Install Glances on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian
22. Sarg – Squid Bandwidth Monitoring
Sarg (Squid Analysis Report Generator) is a free & open-source tool which act as a monitoring tool for your Squid proxy server, it creates reports about your Squid proxy server users, IP addresses, the sites they visit beside some other information.
Features of Sarg
- Licensed under GPL 2 and available in many languages.
- Works under Linux & FreeBSD.
- Generates report in HTML format.
- Very easy to install & use.
Read More: Install Sarg “Squid Bandwidth Monitoring” Tool in Linux
23. Apache Status Monitoring
Apache Module mod_status is an Apache server module that allows you to monitor the workers status of the Apache server. It generates a report in an easy to read HTML format. It shows you the status of all the workers, how much CPU each one using, and what requests are currently handled and number of working and not working workers.
Read More: Apache Web Server Load and Page Statistics Monitoring
24. Monit – Linux Process and Services Monitoring
Monit is a nice program that monitors your Linux & Unix server, it can monitor everything you have on your server, from the main server (Apache, Nginx..) to files permissions, files hashes and web services. Plus a lot of things.
Features of Monit
- Free & open-source, released under AGPL and written in C.
- It can be started from the command line interface or via its special web interface.
- Very effective in monitoring all the software on your system and services.
- A nice web interface with beautiful charts for CPU and RAM usage.
- Monit can automatically take actions in emergency situations.
- A lot more..
Read More: Install Monit Tool in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian
25. Sysstat – All-in-One System Performance Monitoring
Another monitoring tool for your Linux system. Sysstat is not a real command in fact, it’s just the name of the project, Sysstat in fact is a package that includes many performance monitoring tools like iostat, sadf, pidstat beside many other tools which shows you many statistics about your Linux OS.
Features of Sysstat
- Available in many Linux distributions repositories by default.
- Ability to create statistics about RAM, CPU, SWAP usage. Beside the ability to monitor Linux kernel activity, NFS server, Sockets, TTY and filesystems.
- Ability to monitor input & output statistics for devices, tasks.. etc.
- Ability to output reports about network interfaces and devices, with support for IPv6.
- Sysstat can show you the power statistics (usage, devices, the fans speed.. etc) as well.
- Many other features..
Read More: Install Sysstat in Linux and 20 Useful Commands of Sysstat
26. Icinga – Next Generation Server Monitoring
Unlike the other tools, Icinga is a network monitoring program, it shows you many options and information about your network connections, devices and processes, it’s a very good choice for those who are looking for a good tool to monitor their networking stuffs.
Features of Icinga
- Icinga is also free and open-source.
- Very functional in monitoring everything you may have in networking.
- Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL is included.
- Real-time monitoring with A nice web interface.
- Very expendable with modules and extensions.
- Icinga supports applying services and actions to hosts.
- A lot more to discover..
Read More: Install Icinga in RHEL/CentOS 7/6
27. Observium – Network Management and Monitoring
Observium is also a network monitoring tool, it was designed to help you manage your network of servers easily, there are 2 versions from it; Community Edition which is free & open-source and Commercial version which costs £150/year.
Features of Observium
- Written in PHP with MySQL database support.
- Has a nice web interface to output information and data.
- Ability to manage and monitor hundreds of hosts worldwide.
- The community version from it is licensed under QPL license.
- Works on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and more.
Read More: Observium – Network Management and Monitoring Tool for RHEL/CentOS
28. Web VMStat – System Statistics Monitoring
Web VMStat is a very simple web application programmer, that provides a real time system information usage, from CPU to RAM, Swap and input/output information in html format.
Read More: Web VMStat: A Real Time System Statistics Tool for Linux
29. PHP Server Monitoring
Unlike the other tools on this list, PHP Server Monitoring is a web script written in PHP that helps you to manage you websites and hosts easily, it supports MySQL database and is released under GPL 3 or later.
Features
- A nice web interface.
- Ability to send notifications to you via Email & SMS.
- Ability to view the most important information about CPU and RAM.
- A very modern logging system to log connection errors and emails that are sent.
- Support for cronjob services to help you monitor your servers and websites automatically.
Read More: Install PHP Server Monitoring Tool in Arch Linux
30. Linux Dash – Linux Server Performance Monitoring
From its name, “Linux Dash” is a web dashboard that shows you the most important information about your Linux systems such as RAM, CPU, file-system, running processes, users, bandwidth usage in real time, it has a nice GUI and it’s free & open-source.
Read More: Install Linux Dash (Linux Performance Monitoring) Tool in Linux
31. Cacti – Network and System Monitoring
Cacti is nothing more than a free & open-source web interface for RRDtool, it is used often to monitor the bandwidth using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), it can be used also to monitor CPU usage.
Features of Cacti
- Free & open-source, released under GPL license.
- Written in PHP with PL/SQL.
- A cross-platform tool, it works on Windows and Linux.
- User management; you may create different users accounts for Cacti.
Read More: Install Cacti Network and System Monitoring Tool in Linux
32. Munin – Network Monitoring
Munin is also a web interface GUI for RRDtool, it was written in Perl and licensed under GPL, Munin is a good tool to monitor systems, networks, applications and services. It works on all Unix-like operating systems and has a nice plugin system; there are 500 different plugin available to monitor anything you want on your machine. A notifications system is available to send messages to the administrator when there’s an error or when the error is resolved.
Read More: Install Munin Network Monitoring Tool in Linux
33. Wireshark – Network Protocol Analyzer
Also, unlike all the other tools on our list, Wireshark is an analyzer desktop program which is used to analyze network packets and to monitor network connections. It’s written in C with the GTK+ library and released under the GPL license.
Features
- Cross-platform: it works on Linux, BSD , Mac OS X and Windows.
- Command line support: there’s a command line based version from Wireshark to analyze data.
- Ability to capture VoIP calls, USB traffic, network data easily to analyze it.
- Available in most Linux distributions repositories.
Read More: Install Wireshark – Network Protocol Analyzer Tool in Linux
These were the most important tools to monitor your Linux/Unix machines, of course there are many other tools, but these are the most famous. Share your thoughts with us in the comments: What tools & programs do you use to monitor your systems? Have you used any of the tools on this list? What do you think about them?
We have used Munin in the past and it was good. Some elements were a bit complicated. We searched for alternatives and two newer, very simple and comprehensive tools to check out is uptrends and cloudradar (current user).
A good one.
One more suggestion you might want to consider for monitoring tools is AgentlessMonitor from AppPerfect which covers most of the aspects of monitoring like JAVA / J2EE application monitoring, server monitoring, database monitoring, transaction monitoring, network monitoring, log monitoring and system monitoring and last, but not the least is available for free.
Not only do we provide the product, they also provide you the option to have it custom made for you keeping in mind your needs and cost constraints.
It is very easy to use and generates automated alerts in case of exceeding limits or rules violation and also needs no bulky agent to be installed.
@Steve Yes, this tool is great. I have used it for monitoring databases and it worked out of the box. It’s very easy to work on this. Here is the link for agentless monitor http://www.appperfect.com/products/agentless-monitor.php
I think SeaLion (https://sealion.com/) is worth a mention here. It’s not as popular as Nagios or Zabbix but is a very powerful tool. I currently use this tool to keep an eye on my servers and it’s very impressive.
It’s very simple to install and use, has a neat and clean UI. It also lets you add your own commands and has a feature to get all the updates in a single mail as a daily digest.
Again a great article !!
Thanks,
Also I am looking forward for an article related with some specific Opensource tools/softwares to analyse Apache Error and Access logs
More better will be to know a Open Source tool to analyse MySQL logs in realtime i.e. If someone have Webfrontend based on a Customer Java program but uses MySQL for most of the operations then a tool which can show which MySQL query was executed during an operation performed by the end user
You can try Agentless Monitor to monitor your logs in real time.
How about monitoring tool for SAMBA, GUI to know who touch or edit the file in fileserver? thanks for those who want to reply
@Bienlac,
Do you have any monitoring tool for samba in your mind? Please tell us so that we can write a detailed artilce on the requested topic..
A great list, but i think that I can add one more tool to the list. This tool is Anturis and it is a cloud-based tool with all in one character and which can monitor the whole company IT infrastructure and all kinds of servers at the same time. This is an agent tool which checks all the essential metrics like CPU, Memory, Disk, Swap and Network Interface usage, OS Processes etc.
There’s also Monitorix which is easy to setup and can graph a lot of things. Very useful.
Oh it’s in part 1 :) sorry
@Gunner,
Yes, Monitorix tool show you more in depth graphs about your system, here is the guide to install and setup..
https://www.tecmint.com/monitorix-a-lightweight-system-and-network-monitoring-tool-for-linux/
Thanks a lot bro very useful, i appreciate you for posting this.i am waiting for next article.