5 best network monitoring tools for your small business

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When building a network for your small business, whether that's a coffee shop, a B2B enterprise, or even a food truck, having a solid wireless or wired network that's easy to maintain is essential. But it goes further than that. As a responsible entrepreneur, you know that you need to monitor your network to ensure the safety of your patrons, customers, and business partners. That's why, whatever networking equipment you choose for your small business, you need reliable, comprehensive monitoring software to alert you to possible issues, like malicious devices, hackers, or other potential pitfalls. Here are the top network monitoring tools as your SMB network grows.

You don't need to spend thousands to get your small business online

When you're considering monitoring systems for your SMB network, you want them to be as comprehensive as possible so you don't have to spend your own time or that of another employee reviewing the results. You also don't want them to be overly expensive, and Domotz fits that bill as well, with plans that scale from $1.50 per managed device or $35 per managed location (with up to 200 devices). For that, you get a robust suite of tools to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot your network from anywhere. The suite automatically detects every device on your network and pulls up the standard details of IP address, MAC address, manufacturer model, and device type.

But it's much, much more, with advanced features like multi-tenant management, SNMP monitoring, backup and versioning tools, remote device access, and configurable network monitoring and notifications. Domotz can monitor your servers, NAS, workstations, routers, managed switches, and more. And with /16 subnet mask support, it will scale with your business as you grow.

Domotz is a comprehensive network monitoring and management platform that scales with you and your business.

Ever wanted to build a gorgeous status page for your SMB? Put off by freelancer costs and company landing pages that say "call us for a quote" instead of a straightforward cost? Yeah, me too, but not anymore with Instatus. This wonderful monitoring tool watches your network, and alerts your customers or staff to the overall health of the network and your services. That builds transparency and trust with your customers in a beautifully presented way.

It's easy to set up, integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, Twitter, and other platforms to help inform your relevant staff or customer base, and links with most of the monitoring solutions on this list to provide a public-facing solution to keep your customers happy and your customer service team less stressed. You can also use custom CSS, JS, HTML, and more to get the status page you want at a low monthly cost.

Instatus is a wonderful tool for generating custom status pages in seconds, that rival any other at a cost your small business will love.

As your business grows, you need a network monitoring tool that can scale with you, and Paessler's PRTG is one of the best. You get real-time IT network monitoring for every device on your network, with automatic discovery and setup for the appropriate sensor types and triggers for your network topology. That means it knows how to track your bandwidth use, server health, incoming and outgoing traffic, and what's using it.

As it's designed to scale with you, so does the pricing schedule and every sensor is included, so there are no added gotcha moments when it comes to get the bill. That's awesome for keeping your small business under budget. The sensors can be configured to whatever metric you want, from hard drive health, disk space, CPU usage, or bandwidth, so you can keep an eye on your resources and guard against any unwanted adversaries getting access to your network.

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is an easy to set up monitoring solution that automatically detects your entire network and provides real time monitoring with preventative alerts.

OpManager is a comprehensive network monitoring tool that takes proactive steps to keep your network healthy. The suite can monitor the health of every device connected to your network, visualize your traffic flow between sections of your network to identify throughput issues, and has a robust network configuration backup tool so that if the unthinkable happens and an attacker deletes vital configurations, you'll be back up and running in no time.

You can monitor and adjust your wireless network to ensure peak efficiency and coverage, troubleshoot your company's VOIP network, and integrate all your network security rules and configurations into one tool. That means it's easier for your staff to manage the network, as security, OPS and other stakeholders can see the same data and act accordingly.

OpManager is a proactive network management tool that has deep automation capabilities so you can be hands-off with your network and hands-on growing your business.

While many network monitoring tools are on-prem, Datadog is cloud-based and able to give you visibility over your physical network and any cloud-based services that you might be using as part of your services. It can provide end-to-end monitoring of your AWS or RDS databases, see how your network connects together with a dynamic topology map that aids with troubleshooting network balance issues, and more.

It also adds the ability to monitor your full stack, so your network and application performance issues can be analyzed together, and will suggest insights to fix any issues it finds. It might be a little overwhelming for smaller businesses, but if you need to visualize every part of your digital product and the network it runs on, it's one of the best around.

Datadog network performance monitoring is a cloud-based tool that can monitor your network and infrastructure traffic and performance.

Whether you're a small cafe offering a Wi-Fi hotspot for your patrons, a B2B enterprise with networked PCs, or even a single proprietor working from your own basement, it's crucial that you monitor your network for downtime, intruders, attackers, and other issues. It's the only way to keep your and your customer's data safe, while providing uninterrupted service to your clients. The good news is that it doesn't have to be complicated, expensive, or require on-staff IT members to set up and maintain. And with many services now offering pricing that scales with you, it's easier to find the operating budget.

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