LibreNMS: Open-Source Network Monitoring That Actually Understands Devices General Overview LibreNMS is what many admins switch to when they’re tired of SNMP tools that either overwhelm or underdeliver. It’s a fork of Observium, but with a much stronger open community and fewer limitations. If you’re managing switches, routers, firewalls, or mixed vendor gear, this system picks up a lot without asking for custom MIBs or plugins every time.

It does autodiscovery. It draws graphs. It sends alerts

VictoriaMetrics: High-Throughput Time Series Engine That Doesn’t Collapse at Scale General Overview VictoriaMetrics is a time series database designed for one thing — storing and querying a massive amount of metrics, fast. It doesn’t try to do alerting, dashboards, or orchestration. You give it metrics, and it keeps them compressed, indexed, and ready to query. That’s the deal.

Originally created as a high-performance backend for Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics now works in standalone setups, multi

SolarWinds Log Analyzer: Quick Visibility into Logs, Without Building a Stack General Overview SolarWinds Log Analyzer is designed for teams that need to make sense of logs fast — but don’t want to stand up a full ELK stack or maintain their own collectors. It’s not a general-purpose log aggregator for everything under the sun. Instead, it fits into the SolarWinds ecosystem and provides real-time log search, basic correlation, and alerting in a Windows-friendly interface.

It’s most useful when

Checkmk: A Monitoring System That Sticks to the Job General Overview Checkmk isn’t a dashboard toy or cloud demo. It’s monitoring built for the real world — actual production networks, servers with history, things that break when no one’s watching.

At its core, Checkmk came out of the Nagios world. But over the years it’s grown far beyond that. What you get now is a solid agent-based system that keeps things lean: fast state checks, low CPU impact, predictable I/O. It scales — hundreds of hosts