Open source Network Monitoring Tools for Home-Lab

Boni Yeamin
3 min readMay 7, 2023

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👉🏼When it comes to network monitoring tools for your home lab, open-source options provide great flexibility, customization, and cost-effectiveness. Here’s a list of open-source network monitoring tools that can help you monitor and manage your home network effectively:

🟢 Pre-requisites
📌 What is SNMP? https://lnkd.in/dQ_NbxDH
📌 Download VMware https://lnkd.in/d6gGFUYA

🎯Nagios Core: Nagios is a popular and powerful network monitoring tool. Nagios Core is the open-source version that allows you to monitor network services, hosts, and their availability. It provides alerting, notification, and reporting features, making it an excellent choice for monitoring your home lab.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/dXmGUSkm

🎯Zabbix: Zabbix is a feature-rich network monitoring solution that offers real-time monitoring, alerting, and visualization capabilities. It can monitor various network devices, servers, applications, and services. Zabbix has a user-friendly interface and provides extensive reporting options.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/d8-qTMa5

🎯Cacti: Cacti is a web-based network monitoring and graphing tool. It uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to monitor and graph network devices’ performance. Cacti offers customizable templates and can generate visual graphs and reports for network bandwidth utilization, CPU load, memory usage, and more.
🔗https://www.cacti.net/

🎯LibreNMS: Built on the foundations of Observium, LibreNMS is an open-source network monitoring and autodiscovery tool. It can monitor a wide range of devices, including routers, switches, servers, and wireless controllers. LibreNMS offers intuitive dashboards, alerting, and graphing capabilities.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/dQZucJar

🎯Icinga: Icinga is a scalable and extensible open-source monitoring tool. It provides monitoring for hosts, services, and network components. Icinga offers advanced features like distributed monitoring, parallelized service checks, and robust alerting capabilities.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/dFrHrMSR

🎯NetXMS: NetXMS is a comprehensive network and infrastructure monitoring system. It offers performance monitoring, event management, and fault management capabilities. NetXMS supports agentless monitoring, SNMP, and customs agent deployment for monitoring various devices and services.
🔗https://netxms.com/

🎯Observium: Observium is an SNMP-based network monitoring and management platform. It provides automatic discovery, visualization, and monitoring of network devices, servers, and applications. Observium offers a user-friendly interface and includes advanced features like billing integration and traffic analysis.
🔗https://www.observium.org/

🎯OpenNMS: OpenNMS is a feature-rich enterprise-grade network management and monitoring platform. It offers fault management, performance measurement, and event correlation capabilities. OpenNMS supports various protocols and can monitor a wide range of devices and services.
🔗https://www.opennms.com/

🎯Prometheus: Prometheus is a popular open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit. It focuses on time-series-based monitoring, providing powerful querying and alerting capabilities. Prometheus is highly customizable and can be integrated with other tools and frameworks.
🔗https://prometheus.io/

🎯Grafana: Although not a network monitoring tool itself, Grafana is a widely used open-source platform for visualizing and analyzing monitoring data. It can integrate with various monitoring systems, including many of the tools mentioned above. Grafana provides customizable dashboards and advanced data visualization options.
🔗https://grafana.com/

These open-source network monitoring tools offer a wide range of features and capabilities to monitor and manage your home lab effectively. Choose the one that aligns with your requirements, skill set, and preferences, and enjoy the benefits of robust network monitoring in your home environment.

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Boni Yeamin

Officer ( Cyber Security ) in IT Department , Akij Group , Bangladesh