Utility • Oct.31, 2019

Best Mac System Monitoring Apps Best Mac System Monitoring Apps Your computer is equipped with a lot of sensors so that the system can keep an eye on the health of the hardware. MacOS has a built-in system monitoring utility called Activity Monitor, which may be unfamiliar to most casual Mac users. Feb 08, 2018  If you have a quad-core Mac, just the CPU monitoring can take up half the menu bar. Hot tip: Some of menu bar’s widgets, including system. 12 hours ago  Windows users have long turned to Malwarebytes’ free version as a backup for always-on malware software. The Mac version started as an adware removal tool, but as of today, it’s also a full. Our cloud-based user activity monitoring software provides contextual data and insights that enable mid-market organizations to be more productive, secure, and compliant. Our software is affordable, easy-to-use and can be up and running in minutes. Create a FREE account now! Finding the Best System Monitoring Tools & Software will help you manage all Windows, Linux, mac and other devices from a centralized dashboard and give complete control over your Server Infrastructure and Network. These tools monitor every aspect such as networks, servers, computers, devices and more, and in the process, help you stay on top.

If you own a Mac, you would know what the sleek and powerful machine can do. Macs are capable of churning out excellent performance layered in an appealing and user-friendly interface.

As Steve Jobs once said about Macs: We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.

However, there are certain apps, performance patterns, and clogged files that hinder the performance of your Mac. You’ll need a good Mac system monitor to track these apps and files and see how your Mac is performing at large.

With a system monitor for Mac, you can view detailed information about your Mac’s hardware and software, memory, disk speed, and graphics card performance. These details will help you analyze if your Mac is performing at par with your expectations, or if it is time to clear the clutter, or even make an upgrade.

Is Apple’s in-built Activity Monitor good enough?

Mac OS comes with an in-built activity monitor which shows you the processes that are active on your Mac. This can help you manage these processes to see how they affect the activity and performance of your Mac.

The built-in Activity Monitor on the Mac OS is reasonably good as it helps you break down everything by task and even force quit tasks if needed. However, if you are someone who needs to monitor the activity on your Mac continually, then you would realize that the built-in Activity monitor might not be the best tool as you cannot customize it and tweak it as per your needs.

Since there is so much happening inside your Mac which the built-in Activity Monitor does not reveal. Apple is known to minimize distractions with its design. However, this often comes in the way of monitoring its performance.

If you really want to actively monitor your CPU’s performance, disk and network activity, memory usage, and receive custom notifications for these parameters, then there’s not much that the inbuilt Activity Monitor can do. It even occupies most of the screen. Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could monitor your Mac with some icons in the menu bar?

To get to know about the intricacies of your hardware, you will need third-party apps that excel at the job. Here, we will list out some of the best system monitors for your Mac that display your Mac’s performance and activity meters with much detail and accessibility.

Our pick to monitor Mac a whole lot advanced: iStat Menus

When it comes to having a robust and customizable app for monitoring the system performance on your macOS, nothing quite beats iStats Menus.

Overview

Once you install iStat Menus on your Mac and set it up, you will notice that the app runs in the background. It is displayed on the menu bar at the top of your screen where it gives you real-time system updates — something which the inbuilt activity monitor on the Mac OS is incapable of doing.

Constant updates flashed on the menu bar, can help you keep an eye on what your Mac is up to and if anything is hindering its performance.

iStat Menus is one of the most popular activity monitoring apps for Mac. The reason for it is that it can report everything. Here are some of the things that iStat Menus can report on:

• Disks
• Memory pressure
• CPU and GPU performance
• Battery and Power
• Weather
• Network
• Sensors

Other features of this app include hotkeys for quick keyboard access, accessibility and localization features, and notifications based on CPU, disk, network, weather, battery and other events.

With iStat Menus, keeping an active eye on your Mac’s performance is quite accessible. As mentioned above, all you have to do is click on the respective menu bar icons. Once you do that, you will see a drop-down which details out that component of your Mac.

Most of the drop-downs come with graphs that show a detailed breakdown of data which is updated at regular intervals so that you can know how your Mac’s activity has changed over time.

Free System Monitoring Software Machine

Customization

If you are worried about the menu bar cluttering with several icons, then you can rest your anxiety!

iStat Menus is highly customizable. You can choose what to show and what to hide on the menu bar. You also have the option to hide the icons from your menu bar temporarily.

To review what components are metered on the Menu bar, you can head over to the app and check or uncheck the required field box.

You can also update the colors that show in the app to customize the experience for yourself. You have the option to change the menu bar colors, menu bar borders, and even the shade of the drop-down that highlights the graphs and other details. To make sure that you do not get lost in these customization settings, the interface highlights how playing around with the colors will affect the display of your app.

Under the global settings, you also get to customize the update frequency of the app.

With much customization at hand, iStat Menus is the go-to option for a distraction-free and clean activity-monitoring app, which does the least to confuse you.

Performance

The CPU and GPU tab on iSats Menu lets you keep a track on your processor’s current load. Once you click on the menu bar icon, it reveals a drop-down list of the top five processes that are running. These processes are updated with time — you can choose the update frequency along with the displayed processes in the CPU & GPU tab of the app.

You get to view the system performance stats in the form of line graphs, pie charts, or bar graphs, or numerical value — whichever option you choose.

When you hover over these graphs, you get more insights in the form of a popup that highlights system loads for a particular time that may have triggered high CPU usage.

Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? This app is quite a haven for developers who want to check if their app is taking a toll on Mac’s performance.

With memory comes the capacity to expand on your current tasks — the workload that your Mac is capable of handling without crashing or starting to lag.

iStats Menu’s memory performance indicator provides you with ample insight into the memory bit of your Mac. The popup graphs are informative and easy to understand at the same time. They let you track the ‘memory pressure’ metric, which is much more useful than simply knowing how much your memory is ‘free’.

The detailed memory stats help you see how much of your RAM is wired, active, compressed, or free. It also lets you see the processes that are consuming most memory.

There’s more that this app has to offer! The weather module is a new integration to iStat Menus, and the developers have done the job of integrating it well.

The menu bar icon displays the current weather conditions, and when you click on it, it expands into a whole widget which shows you the ins and outs of your current geography.

You get custom icons for different weather conditions, be it rain, storm, snow, or a bright sunny day!

The well-designed weather module also shows you the daily forecast — what to expect from the day, along with the maximum and minimum temperature based on your preferred units. If you are a weather buff, then you would like to know that you also get to know the dew point, the wind’s speed, and direction.

Notifications

This is probably one of the most exciting features of iStat Menus. The notification feature allows you to have notifications every time your Mac hits a specific condition. It can help you stay notified if your Mac heats up, overuses the CPU, or clogs the memory.

You can get custom notifications once your memory usage crosses a certain threshold so that you can begin quitting the apps.

The custom notifications also work with the weather module, so if you are working on your Mac and the weather turns grey and stormy, a notification pops up right away.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

While iStat Menus provides a comprehensive insight into your Mac’s functioning, at the first look, it seems like advanced users could make better use of it. However, if you spend some time on the app, you will get familiar with its buttons and icons, and the settings that govern its feature.

Also, we wished that the icon side of things was a but more aesthetic — syncing well with the design-rich layers of the macOS. However, that’s not much to be worried about and can surely be fixed with future updates.

Availability and pricing

The single license for iStat Menus can be bought at $14.15; the upgrade price happens to be at $11.79. This also includes 6 months of weather data. However, if you want to try it out, you can always download the trial version.

iStat Menus is also available at Setapp. Setapp provides access to hundreds of apps per month. It has a free 7-day trial, and then you have to subscribe it at $9.99 per month.

Also great: MenuBar Stats

MenuBar stats is another great app that can help you monitor the performance of your Mac in a clean, sleek and straightforward interface.

MenuBar Stats, with its latest release MenuBar Stats 3, has completely reinvented the app to make it more compatible with the newer versions of the Mac OS.

It has been ‘completely re-written from the ground’ and comes with modules such as CPU, disk, network, Bluetooth, fan, and more.
Each of these modules can be accessed front he menu bar and/or the notification center of your Mac OS.

Menubar Stats 3 comes with a host of features that will make monitoring fun, visually appealing, and accessible on your Mac OS.

We particularly like the separate window mode feature as it lets you look at each of the modules individually in a separate window. With separate windows on the same screen, you get access to detailed information about individual components in a clear and concise manner.

On the other hand, the combined window mode on Menubar Stats 3 allows you to see all the information in a single window. There is no pre-set limit to the number of modules that you can add. You can drag and drop the modules to expand the window; if there is no space on your screen, the window will activate the scroll view mode.

Menubar Stats 3 is also known to have great support, so if you have any queries around the app, you can contact the support team and can expect a response in no time!

Menubar Stats 3 comes with a free trial and can be purchased on the App Store for $4.99.

Other contenders

While the above-mentioned apps are quite popular and highly rated, there are other apps that can help you with monitoring your Mac’s performance with much ease.

Free open source monitoring app: XRG for Mac

Talking about open sources, XRG for Mac is a functional system monitor tool that you could try if you do want to monitor your Mac’s performance for free.

Yes, it is free to use and comes with almost all the features that a performance monitoring app should have. This app lets you monitor your CPU and GPU activity, memory usage, machine temperature, battery status, network activity, disk I/O, stock market data, and current weather.

There are also a handful of settings that you can customize to personalize your experience with this app, change units and modify the way data and graphs are displayed.

However, the way the numbers are displayed on it can get cluttered and cannot be compared to the visual aesthetics of iStat Menus and Menubar Stats 3, and it could take a while for you to figure things out with this app.

Nonetheless, it is a must-have if you are looking for a free tool to monitor your Mac’s performance and don’t mind spending some time figuring out the interface.

Clean and lightweight performance monitoring tool: Monity

Monity is another app that you can download on the App Store to track the performance of your Mac.

Monity is excellent for those who want a system monitoring app to work as a widget. It rests in the Today View section of your Mac OS and oversees various components of your hardware. Monity does not have menu bars — they say that you can view your network and system usage ‘without messing around with huge and uncomfortable symbols in the menu bar’.

Monity can be used for memory management, monitoring network activity, battery and disk usage, app usage statistics, sensors, temperatures, and fan speed.

It provides you with detailed insights into each of these components. Besides, the app is regularly updated to sync well with the visual changes that the new Mac updates bring.

Monity delivers data to you in an effortless way. For an app that is lightweight and cheap, it works exceedingly well, delivering you with stats and data at your disposal.

Monity comes in fifteen languages and can be purchased from the app store for $4.99.

macOS system monitoring widget: iStatistica

iStatistica is another monitoring app which includes notification center widget and a status bar menu — a mix of what you would find in iStat Menus and Monity.

With iStatistica, it is quite simple to keep track of your CPU’s performance — all you have to do is slide out your Mac’s Notification Center and you will get insights into the CPU, memory, battery, network activity, and disk usage. However, you will have to download an additional plugin to gain access to fans, sensors, and disk I/O monitoring.

The app is available in six languages — English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Italian.

If you want continuous access to iStatistica in your menu bar, you can click settings and select ‘Open iStatistica at Login’ ooer, if you only want it to be in your Notification Centre, you can switch off the autorun feature.

iStatistica runs on macOS 10.12 or higher, so if you have trouble using this app, make sure that your macOS is updated to the latest macOS Catalina 10.15.

iStatistica comes with a 7-day free trial. Post that, you can purchase a license for $7.99.

Battery health diagnostic: coconutBattery

coconutBattery has been around since 2005. With the years of development that has been put into it, it does a fine job of displaying the health of your battery on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Free System Monitoring

It shows you the live performance of your battery, the age of the device and the battery, how often the battery is charged, the current health of your battery, and much more.

You also get the option to save the current health information of your device’s battery so you can see the changes in the health over time and know precisely when it is time to replace the battery or make an upgrade.

The app also syncs through iOS, which means that you do not have to connect your phone through a USB every time you want to check the health of your iPhone or iPad’s battery.

coconutBattery, however, is strictly a battery monitoring app, so you cannot view other parameters of your Mac on it, such as CPU, disk, and memory usage.

The pro version of the app — coconutBattery Plus — comes with additional features such as WiFi support, iOS Advance Viewer, custom printing templates, notifications, and more. It can be purchased for around $12, depending on your region.

However, you get to try the Plus-upgrade features for 14 consecutive starts of coconutBattery.

Storage monitoring tool: SMART Utility

The newer Macs come with faster SSDs that have high data transfer speeds. To keep track of the health of your drive and to diagnose the problems, it is essential to have an app which takes care of it all. SMART Utility for Mac is one such app which is designed to do just that.

It is compatible with HDDs and SSDs that monitor, analyze, and report on the condition of your Mac’s drive.

The app displays crucial information about your drives, such as the model, power-on hours, capacity, bad sector counts, temperature, and error counts and types. It can also display information in the menu bar and supports scanning in the background — a great feature since you do not have to keep the app in foreground every time.

SMART Utility is a lightweight app and comes with a free one-month trial with four launches. A personal license can be purchased at $25. The price for a family license if $40. If you own a business, then you can get a business license for $100. Educational sites have to pay $65, while a consultant license comes at $350.

Make your pick

With a plethora of options to choose from, you can pick just the right apps to get to know more about your Mac’s performance under the hood. iStat Menus takes care of most of these parameters, but if you want to get more on the artistic side of things, you can probably go for Monity. For battery diagnostics, nothing quite beats coconutBattery. The best part? Well, you can also sync it with your iPad and iPhone.

We hope that this list provided you with ample options to get to know your Mac better. A fine-tuned Mac opens up doors to more productivity, and we have designed this list and our preferences by keeping that in mind.

Happy tuning!

Keeping track of everything happening on your operating systems may sound daunting, but the right software allows you to monitor and manage every element and layer of your IT environment. Managing large enterprises and systems means sometimes things just get overloaded and fail. It’s impossible to prevent errors or issues, but you can keep a close eye on your network to troubleshoot as efficiently as possible.

Many businesses provide a guaranteed uptime to their customers and maintaining this isn’t just a matter of keeping promises. Businesses unable to meet their service-level agreements or keep things running smoothly can suffer lost trust from customers, lost revenue, and lost contracts if a customer has a bad experience.

Using an effective and comprehensive tool with good reporting features, alerting abilities, and uptime trackers will help you ensure service levels are met most of the time, and problems don’t affect your end users. By checking measurements constantly and preventing smaller problems from getting out of control, operating system monitoring tools go a long way toward minimizing overall failures and shutdowns of IT environments.

What Operating Systems Should Be Monitored?

You might be dealing with several operating systems in your enterprise, and most have tools purpose-built for monitoring them. When it comes to matching your OS with system monitoring software, Linux, Windows, Mac, and Unix each benefit from a range of options. If you’re using a more obscure operating system, you might not have appropriate tools at your disposal.

You’ll likely have luck finding a high-quality, enterprise-level OS monitor if you’re using one of the following systems:

• Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10
• Windows Server 2008, Server 2012, Server 2016
• Windows Management Instrumentation
• Mac Os X
• Unix
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu Server, Debian, and Fedora

What Should an OS Monitor Measure?

Before you install operating system monitoring software, you need to have a clear idea of the metrics you can and should monitor. These can give you key clues about the performance and health of your system.

• CPU utilization: Depending on which processes are running, your CPU consumption will be higher or lower: a lot of process means a lot of CPU use. If a process has an error and ends up in a hung state, it’ll keep running even when you think you’ve closed the related program. This can keep the CPU running unexpectedly, or could increase CPU usage past a typical point, leading to overheating.
• Network performance: Various aspects of your network can impact operating system performance for end users. This includes faulty network hardware, viruses or malware in the network, incorrect configurations, and protocol overloads or failures. If network bandwidth is high, this can affect all your network traffic and may cause applications or systems to run slowly.
• Memory: If you’re using too much memory at one time, it can affect your operating system, with performance issues or crashes causing major problems.
• Disk drives: If the physical disks you’re accessing for storage are too full, you can end up with high response times whenever you try to retrieve or save data. This can have a big impact on how all of your applications work (read more about checking hard drive health here).
• Events: With all operating systems, you need to monitor event logs, as this is a major factor in keeping your network and infrastructure secure. Unusual event logs or a sudden spike in logs can indicate an error or a network breach.
• OS services: For all operating systems, critical services run in the background—e.g., Windows Active Directory. If one of these services malfunctions or stops working, your whole operating system can stop working as expected.

OS Monitoring Best Practices

Before you start monitoring your operating systems, you need to ensure you have a clear understanding of the best practices involved. You could use the highest-quality OS tools in the world and still not get much out of them if you were using them incorrectly or weren’t monitoring the relevant metrics.

Below are eight key best practices to follow:

1. Test configuration and rollout. Before you set up your monitoring system for your entire business, you need to test your configuration on a small number of devices to make sure everything is operating correctly. Have a set rollout process, during which you test changes and problems to see how the monitoring software reacts. Once you feel certain the tool is working as expected and is configured correctly, you can go ahead and roll it out business-wide.
2. Set baselines. Once you have your software set up, you need to monitor your systems to set baselines. Assuming no incidents during this time, the measurements you get will likely serve as a clear and accurate baseline for general operating system behavior. You can use these baselines later to detect security or OS health issues.
3. Commit to constant monitoring. To get accurate measurements and spot problems clearly and quickly, you need to be monitoring your operating systems constantly. This will help you identify issues as they arise and build a bigger picture of more complex issues, such as potential blind SQL injections or DDoS attacks.
4. Implement comprehensive security. The next step is to ensure your system monitoring software is set up as part of a larger, comprehensive security approach. This should include firewalls, network protection, and anti-malware software. OS monitoring software can form part of a system for security, but generally you should have other tools set up too.
5. Set up alerts. Your alerts should be set up to focus on the main problems that are likely risks to your business and major hardware issues or declines in OS or hardware health. You can also obtain lists and repositories of common viruses and malware and set up alerts if your system shows any indicators of these issues. Configure OS tools to alert you only to the most necessary data to avoid being overwhelmed.
6. Have an escalation plan. Within your business, you need to have escalation processes in place to pass issues on to the relevant people. This boosts the productivity of your team and stops your end users needing to go through an entire chain of people who cannot help them before their problem is solved.
7. Complete audits and reports. If you deal with any sensitive data your users access through your operating systems or servers, you need to regularly complete compliance audits to ensure everything is operating as expected. In addition, you should be examining reports from your software regularly to check your configuration is correct, and you haven’t missed any vital alerts.
8. Conduct regular reviews. Finally, your configuration, data collection, and monitoring setup should be reviewed frequently, to ensure it’s still working in the most suitable way for your business plans, your risk factors, and your needs.

Best System Monitoring Software

Now I’ll get into my picks for the best monitor program. In operating system contexts in 2020, you need something comprehensive to ensure hybrid infrastructures and complex networks are completely covered. Most of the OS tools on my list provide free trials, so you can try a few to determine which one best suits your needs.

This guide focuses on helping you to identify the best Windows system monitor tool. If you need Mac system monitoring tools, some of these are compatible, while others are Linux or Windows only.

My top choice for operating system monitoring software is SolarWinds^® Server & Application Monitor (SAM). In monitoring servers and applications, SAM looks at the metrics discussed above as factors with an impact on an operating system’s ability to function.

For example, SAM can monitor Windows and Unix servers and their physical health, including checking on disk capacity, measuring CPU utilization, and checking whether there’s sufficient virtual memory for the tasks you’re trying to perform. When tracked, these physical metrics can give clues as to why your workstation or server operating system may not be functioning as expected. Especially with historical data, you can more easily see when something is operating outside normal boundaries and resolve it quickly.

SAM includes specific measuring tools and templates for looking at Windows performance, such as page file usage, processor time, pages per second, and disk queue length. This makes it possible to spot rogue processes and stop them before they affect productivity too much. In addition, it can monitor Windows network load balancing, print service, remote desktop service, FTP service, and update service.

SAM’s hardware health monitoring utilities are also robust. They can look at the drivers and firmware you have installed and check hard drive performance, hosted virtual machines, network interfaces, processors, what version of Windows you’re running, and which updates have been applied. Moreover, SAM helps you determine whether system slowdowns are stemming from one greedy or malfunctioning application, or whether the issue originates in your network infrastructure.

Windows is just one of the operating systems SAM can monitor. The tool also includes out-of-the-box templates for Unix and AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX environments. In addition, it has templates for managing various Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu Server, Debian, and Fedora. With this kind of broad applicability, you can use SAM for numerous operating systems, including networks or environments with different operating systems for different tasks. All this information can be displayed in one easy-to-use dashboard, with multiple tabs for switching between different pieces of relevant information.

You can try the full version of SAM free for 30 days.

Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is another great tool from SolarWinds. Any of the devices connected to your network need to be monitored by a network monitoring tool, because what you might think is a problem with your operating system or physical hardware could be a problem with bandwidth or a network slowdown—especially if you use centralized file storage systems accessed through a LAN or WAN. SolarWinds NPM can map your entire network, including all your devices and application dependencies, and provide you with a clear picture of your network topology. This can help you understand how one device can affect another, along with your risk factors if one device or operating system becomes infected with malware.

NPM includes LAN and WAN monitoring and optimization tools to ensure everything is functioning properly, and to help you improve your setup if something isn’t running as well as it could. It includes network uptime and availability tools, so you can pinpoint network spikes and preempt them if necessary. By continuously monitoring all network devices for faults, availability, and performance, you can improve troubleshooting efforts and set alerts to trigger when performance thresholds are met. When troubleshooting an issue for an end user, you want answers fast, and ideally before productivity goes down. These availability tools enable you to quickly determine whether network problems are behind the issue at hand.

Other key features include Wi-Fi analysis, which helps determine whether a device is simply in a low-access zone or whether there are critical issues with Wi-Fi devices, firewalls, or load balancers in your network. Many SolarWinds tools are part of the Orion^® Platform, and as such can be used individually or in conjunction with each other. This allows you to mix and match as necessary or choose only the most critical tools to your setup. In combination with other tools, NPM can help you gain a full picture of your operating system and IT environment health, performance, and availability.

Like SAM, NPM has a 30-day free trial available.

ManageEngine OpManager brings together a range of features in one package. It includes network monitoring, server management, and tools for dealing with fault and performance issues.

Tracking server resource usage can reveal the source of problems within your operating system. OpManager can keep tabs on your CPU usage, memory consumption, I/O, network, disk usage, and processes, to determine where physical health issues lie. Within CPU usage, for example, it can measure utilization, speed, idle time, and processor time. In addition, OpManager monitors Windows services to check everything is functioning correctly, with a significant amount of this monitoring done out-of-the-box. It processes Windows event logs to check for security breaches, and monitors guest operating systems hosted virtually to ensure they’re functioning correctly.

OpManager, like SolarWinds NPM, includes network monitoring tools for determining whether poor operating system performance is the result of bandwidth or network component issues. It also monitors your WAN and LAN closely to check for network performance issues and reliability. Each of these metrics can be measured over the long term to set historical benchmarks, and you can establish alerts to let you know when an issue has occurred.

Several add-ons and plugins are available for use with OpManager, including plugins for network traffic analysis, network configuration, application performance management, and firewall management.

You can access a free trial of OpManager for 30 days, or you can download the free version with limited features.

The next tool on my list is Paessler PRTG. It has several user interfaces, including the desktop app, a web interface, and apps for both iOS and Android. This means you can access the PRTG features wherever you are, and you can also use multiple interfaces simultaneously.

PRTG has flexible and easy-to-use alerting you can use through your normal client, or through SMS and email if you prefer. You can schedule alerts and set up systems, so you receive high-priority alerts at your preferred times. If you don’t want to receive floods of alerts when an issue occurs, dependencies and acknowledging can be used to streamline the alerting system.

One of the cool things about PRTG is its interactive and good-looking graphics and maps, as well as various dashboards to show live status information. You can create maps of your entire network and all your devices with the tool’s map designer. The map designer also allows you to use various map objects to display the status of devices, so you can get a full picture of your network layout and health.

You can use PRTG for distributed networks, with the ability to apply remote probes in different geographic locations. You can also spread the monitoring load by spreading probes out as much as you like. PRTG comes with a set of reporting capabilities, and you can request reports on demand or be provided with regular reports depending on your needs.

PRTG offers a 30-day free trial.

Quest Foglight is another good example of OS monitoring software. It provides monitoring across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, with the aim of serving as a complete monitoring service. It can monitor physical operating systems and virtual ones, and can help monitor VMware, Hyper-V, Azure, and AWS along with physical servers and the operating systems they use.

There are multiple versions of Foglight. Which one you choose will depend on whether you want to primarily monitor cloud environments with virtual desktops or you’re looking more at a server or database monitoring solution. Whether you use Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Cassandra, Foglight can provide monitoring and performance optimization. It keeps an eye on every application, database, network device, and server tied in to your operating systems and shows you performance metrics for your entire IT environment in a centralized location with multiple dashboards.

Like other tools, Foglight measures storage capacity trends, top I/O users, memory availability and consumption, top system users, and CPU utilization. Keeping track of these metrics helps ensure your operating systems and hosts are under control and problems are spotted as early as possible.

Foglight is available as a 30-day free trial.

The final tool I want to talk about is Nagios XI. Nagios has a powerful engine designed for IT infrastructure and systems monitoring, with a high degree of scalability as your network grows. It provides several dashboards, with centralized information, so you can get a clear overview of your entire system at a glance. You can highly customize the GUI with mix-and-match layout and design preferences on a per-user basis, which helps make this tool your own.

Nagios includes infrastructure management and mapping, giving you a clear picture of network connections and dependencies potentially affecting the performance of any individual workstation or device. It also carefully monitors infrastructure metrics pertaining to applications, services, operating systems, and network protocols.

Nagios XI offers a free trial, good for 60 days. You can also access an online demo.

How to Choose the Best System Monitoring Software

There’s no shortage of good-quality operating system monitoring software on the market in 2020. Hopefully after reading this guide, you’re equipped to make an informed decision, accounting for your operating system and organizational priorities. My top pick is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. It provides a quick and easy setup for many useful features, which together enable you to consistently and comprehensively monitor your operating systems and troubleshoot issues well before they affect your end users. By taking advantage of the free trial, you can test the full software to see if it works for you.