Network management is a very vast and vital process for an organization’s hierarchy to perform well and easy. The network management  is handled by a specialized personality in every organization, which is the network analyst. He uses a lot of tools to monitor the working of a network, and catch the rise and falls, and he has got to get everything going smoothly, because a single minute of downtime can create a chaos in the workflow of the whole organization.

One of the most important tool to implement this smooth workflow is to use various network monitoring tools. While the IDS detects the threats and problems from outside the network, a Network monitor monitors the problems caused internally due to the overload on a server, or due to minor crashes in one of the network components or staff. The network monitor tracks the flow of packets, and where ever it finds the packets to be showing some weird activity, it detects the error at that particular point. For an example, to detect the working of a web server, the network monitor will keep on sending a small 32 byte ping request periodically, and track whether it receives It and gets back in time.

There are hundreds of network monitoring tools around. These tools generally cost a good fortune, and to be choosing the right one to spend the money on, it becomes very vital to spend some time in research to find the best tool to suit your needs, and the one that performs the best and is well and good to implement in a professional network. There are a lot of factors that are essential in deciding the same, but understanding them in short time like this is not easy. So, with the help of our network experts, we have created a list of some of the best free network monitoring tools, that you may use in implementing your network’s security and long runtime. The list of the tools is given below.

1) Fiddler

Fiddler is best free networking tool for any system and platform. It introduce some key features that make it more popular among users. like performance testing, HTTP/HTTPs traffic recording, web debugging and many more.

2) Nagios

Nagios is another free network monitoring tool over the internet. The Open Source monitoring solution that started a phenomenon and continues to provide dependable monitoring to hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide

3) Nedi

Nedi is also open source network monitoring tool for users. NeDi unfolds its full potential with CDP, FDP and/or LLDP capable devices in the core of your network. It can also include other network components, but it works best, when those are located at the network perimeter.

4) EasyNetMonitor

The smallest free tool for monitoring computers in your local network and any internet hosts. Just start EasyNetMonitor, open popup-menu in tray and get the information about computers network state.

Free network monitor EasyNetMonitor is a small very easy program used to test whether remote PC or other internet host is reachable across a network. Simply open EasyNetMonitor icon in tray and get info about activity of computers in your local network and hosts in internet.

5) Microsoft Network Monitor

This Network monitoring tool providing from Microsoft. Network Monitor 3.4 is the archived version protocol analyzer and is no longer under development. Microsoft Message Analyzer is the replacement for Network Monitor 3.4. Microsoft Message Analyzer supports the latest protocol parsers for capturing, displaying, and analyzing protocol messaging traffic, events, and other system or application messages in troubleshooting and diagnostic scenarios. It is a significantly more powerful tool for capturing and analyzing protocol messages.

6) Cacti

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices

7) Zenoss

Zenoss core is enterprise IT Monitoring tool presenting some key features here –

• Cross-platform device performance and availability monitoring
• Highly customizable web-based console and dashboards
• Device discovery, modeling, and classification
• Layer 3 network topology maps
• Agentless data collection
• Fault and event monitoring and management
• Event classification, de-duplication, auto-clearing, mapping, transformation, and lifecycle management
• Event triggers and notifications
• Availability monitoring for devices, networks, processes, and services, etc

8) Paessler

Paessler is powerful and easy to use network monitoring software. PRTG Network Monitor runs on a Windows machine within your network, collecting various statistics from the machines, software, and devices which you designate. PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports.

9) Bandwidthd

BandwidthD tracks usage of TCP/IP network subnets and builds html files with graphs to display utilization.

10) Icinga

Icinga is for Monitoring a network with multitude of services, devices and dependencies between them is complex enough. No need to make set-up or maintenance of the monitoring system itself any more complex.

11) The Dude

The Dude network monitor is a new application by MikroTik which can dramatically improve the way you manage your network environment. It will automatically scan all devices within specified subnets, draw and layout a map of your networks, monitor services of your devices and alert you in case some service has problems.

12) Total Network Monitor

Total Network Monitor is a free network monitoring software for the continuous monitoring of the local network, individual computers, and services that require careful attention and thorough control.