Did you know that almost 40% of servers had at least one outage in the last twelve months? Veeam reports that the most common reason for outrages is infrastructure failure which puts the current hardware monitoring practices under the scanner. Hardware failures are rising rapidly, and businesses, especially SMBs are paying thousands of dollars in damages.
One way you can be on the safe side is by using a hardware monitoring software. These tools interact with hardware components such as motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and network points to measure their conditions and properties and present detailed reports to users.
Failure to detect the asset’s health can lead to a critical loss of revenue and we’re here to help you prevent that. We have emphasized on uninterrupted scanning, event log management, availability checking, extended features, usability, and price. Based on our analysis, here are the top 5 hardware monitoring tools that can help you detect aging devices, malware attacks, and computational efficiency.
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is a swiss army knife of network monitoring tools. It has a comprehensive set of features that are surprisingly easy to use once you get to know them.
You can configure servers to access reliability, availability, and other real-time data and you can even ping IP to find and connect nearby devices. You can customize datasets, drag and drop assets, and set up mobile notifications when metrics reach a threshold. The best part is that it easily integrates with IBM, Dell, and Cisco products.
The free plan allows you to monitor up to 100 sensors beyond which, you’ll have to get a premium plan. Paid plans start from $1,799 for 1 server and 500 sensors. You can upgrade the plans depending on your use cases and all of them come with a 30-day free trial.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is one of the best hardware monitoring software we have found in its class. It has an incredible range of customization and thanks to the intuitive dashboard it often edges out its competitors. SolarWinds lets you tweak and control granular aspects of hardware, set up custom alerts, and it has a low barrier of entry for people outside of tech and IT backgrounds. The Component Wizard Monitor gives you in-depth asset visibility and it’s even compatible with AWS (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and Azure.
Price starts from $1,663 for the Server & Application Monitor but you can get a 30-day free trial to try it out.
Opmantek Open-AudIT
Opmantek is a popular IT management company that offers a range of monitoring and security tools. Opmantek Open-AudIT is one of the most effective and polished hardware monitoring tools we’ve tested for research. When you boot up the program for the first time it sweeps your entire network and stores images you can refer back to later.
With each scan that you can schedule, Open-AudIT will reevaluate device configuration and even detect unauthorized access. The dashboard is clean and powerful, offering historical data, scheduled audit reports, and inventory records. Open-AudIT is actually free to use in a network with up to 20 nodes, beyond which you can take a 30-day free trial or jump on a paid plan.
Atera
Atera takes a unique approach to hardware monitoring by working over the cloud. It’s ideal for SMBs, contractors, and MSPs because it offers unlimited device monitoring and charges a flat fee for the technician (user).
Atera has a help desk menu that allows users to remotely access endpoints, analyze operational efficiency, and address issues immediately. Atera has a free trial for Growth and Power plans beyond which it charges $129/month and $169/month respectively.
ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine has a host of hardware, IT, and application management products, and their network monitoring suite is one of their finest.
With ManageEngine OpManager you can create alert thresholds, configure monitoring criteria, analyze the real-time health of all network devices and solve network traffic issues. OpManager has a free edition for small teams but you’ll have to get in touch with the team to chalk out a feature/price strategy for extended components. A configured hardware monitoring tool is necessary to mitigate downtime risks and asset failure. The software we discussed above have powerful features which also can make them a bit confusing to use. With a managed IT services provider (MSP), you can delegate the repetitive yet time-consuming tasks of hardware monitoring to a team of experts. An IT partner can also help you with industry expertise and custom solutions. To know more about hardware monitoring solutions from IT experts, get in touch with MyTek today.