Best Free Network Bandwidth Monitoring Tools

ManageEngine OpManager functions as a powerful network bandwidth monitoring solution, enabling IT teams to gain deep visibility into traffic patterns and bandwidth utilization across the network. By leveraging flow technologies such as NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, and IPFIX, OpManager captures granular traffic data to identify top talkers, applications, protocols, and conversations consuming bandwidth. This helps administrators detect network congestion, unusual spikes, and potential misuse, allowing for informed capacity planning and faster troubleshooting. With intuitive dashboards, real-time traffic graphs, and customizable alerts, OpManager empowers organizations to optimize bandwidth usage, enhance network performance, and ensure uninterrupted service delivery.

Network Performance Monitoring Made Easy. Obkio is a simple Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting SaaS solution that allows users to continuously monitor the health of their network and core business applications to improve the end-user experience. The innovative software application identifies the causes of intermittent network, VoIP, video, and applications slowdown in seconds and collect information to quickly troubleshoot problems before they affect your end-users. Deploy network monitoring Agents at strategic locations in a company's offices or network destinations such as data sites, remote sites, external client sites, or public or private clouds to continuously monitor performance using synthetic traffic exchanged every 500ms. Obkio's Agents give you a 360-degree overview of your network by measuring the network metrics like matter most (jitter, latency, packet loss, VoIP quality), and alerting you of any performance degradation.

NetFlow Analyzer is a comprehensive traffic analysis tool that leverages flow technologies to provide real-time visibility into network bandwidth performance. NetFlow Analyzer is primarily a bandwidth monitoring tool, which has optimized thousands of networks globally, offering a holistic view of your network bandwidth and traffic patterns. NetFlow Analyzer is a unified solution that collects, analyzes, and reports on your network's bandwidth usage, and by whom. NetFlow Analyzer is your partner in optimizing bandwidth usage across a million interfaces globally, as well as providing network forensics and network traffic analysis. Reconfigure policies with traffic shaping via ACLs or class-based policies to gain control of the applications that use the most bandwidth. NetFlow Analyzer leverages Cisco NBAR technology to give you deep visibility into Layer 7 traffic and recognize applications that use dynamic port numbers or hide behind known ports.

Paessler PRTG is an all-inclusive monitoring software solution developed by Paessler. Equipped with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface with a cutting-edge monitoring engine, PRTG optimizes connections and workloads as well as reduces operational costs by avoiding outages while saving time and controlling service level agreements (SLAs). The solution is packed with specialized monitoring features that include flexible alerting, cluster failover solution, distributed monitoring, in-depth reporting, maps and dashboards, and more. PRTG monitors your entire IT infrastructure. All important technologies are supported: • SNMP: ready-to-use and custom options • WMI and Windows Performance Counters • SSH: for Linux/Unix and macOS systems • Traffic analysis using flow protocols or packet sniffing • HTTP requests • REST APIs returning XML or JSON • Ping, SQL, and many more

Zabbix is the ultimate enterprise-level software designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices. Zabbix is Open Source and comes at no cost. Detect problem states within the incoming metric flow automatically. No need to peer at incoming metrics continuously. The native web interface provides multiple ways of presenting a visual overview of your IT environment. Save yourself from thousands of repetitive notifications and focus on root causes of a problem with Zabbix Event correlation mechanism. Automate monitoring of large, dynamic environments.Build distributed monitoring solution while keeping centralized control. Integrate Zabbix with any part of your IT environment. Get access to all Zabbix functionality from external applications through Zabbix API.

BitMeter OS is a free, open source bandwidth monitoring tool compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS. It tracks your internet and network usage, presenting the data through a web-based interface or command-line tools. The Web Interface offers real-time graphs and charts, updating every second to display current connection activity. Users can access detailed bandwidth usage for specific dates and export this information to spreadsheets. The History pane visualizes usage patterns over hours, days, and months. BitMeter OS allows users to set customizable alerts for when internet usage surpasses defined thresholds. Additionally, the calculator utility estimates upload/download times and data transfer capacities. The Preferences pane enables interface customization, including a built-in RSS feed. BitMeter can only monitor network traffic going to/from the computer where it is installed. If you want to monitor multiple computers then you will need to install BitMeter on each one.

Tessabyte Throughput Test is an application for testing the performance of a wireless or wired network. This utility continuously sends TCP and UDP data streams across your network and computes important metrics, such as upstream and downstream throughput values, packet loss, and round-trip time, and displays the results in both numeric and chart formats. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 connections and allows the user to evaluate network performance depending on the Quality of Service settings. In addition to this core functionality, the application can generate reports, conduct pre-scheduled tests, and allows payload customization. Tessabyte can be used for capacity testing, link quality analysis, testing network congestion, WLAN performance evaluation, Quality of Service (QoS) assessment, firmware and hardware updates validation, network topology planning, comparative benchmarking, load balancing verification, SLA compliance verification, and hardware compatibility testing.

Cisco ThousandEyes is a cutting-edge network intelligence platform designed to provide organizations with deep visibility into digital experiences across the internet, cloud, and enterprise networks. By leveraging advanced monitoring and analytics, ThousandEyes helps businesses pinpoint, troubleshoot, and resolve performance issues impacting critical applications, websites, and services. Its comprehensive suite of tools offers insights into network performance, application delivery, and user interactions, enabling organizations to ensure seamless connectivity and optimal user experiences. Widely adopted by Fortune 500 companies and SaaS providers, ThousandEyes is a trusted solution for navigating the complexities of modern hybrid and multi-cloud environments, empowering IT teams to proactively manage and optimize their digital ecosystems.

Icinga is a monitoring system which checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor large, complex environments across multiple locations. Icinga 2 is the monitoring server and requires Icinga Web 2 on top in your Icinga Stack. The configuration can be easily managed with either the Icinga Director, config management tools or plain text within the Icinga DSL. Find answers, take actions and become a problem-solver. Be flexible and take your own ways. Stay curious, stay passionate, stay in the loop. Tackle your monitoring challenge. The Icinga stack spans six core strengths that cover all aspects of monitoring. Level up with valuable insights and on-time notifications, eye-opening visuals and analytics. Icinga easily integrates within your systems, and gives you the power to automate your tasks.

Provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party addons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems. Provides a central view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. Powerful dashboards provide at-a-glance access to powerful monitoring information and third-party data. Views provide users with quick access to the information they find most useful. Automated, integrated trending and capacity planning graphs allow organizations to plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems catch them by surprise. Alerts are sent to IT staff, business stakeholders, and end-users via email or mobile text messages, providing them with outage details so they can start resolving issues immediately.

NetFlow Analyzer is an easy solution for net admins to better understand bandwidth consumption, traffic trends, applications, hosts and traffic anomalies, by visualising the traffic by network devices, interfaces and subnets, traffic segments and end users. NetFlow Analyzer utilizes Cisco® NetFlow, IPFIX, NSEL, sFlow and compatible netflow-like protocols to help net admins with bandwidth monitoring, network traffic investigation, analyses and reporting. This way, companies can optimise networks and applications, plan network expansion, minimize time spent on troubleshooting and diagnostics, and improve security. NetVizura allows you to define custom traffic to be monitored based on IP subnets and traffic characteristics like protocol and service used. Monitor specific traffic for each organisational unit in your network such as departments, remote sites and collections of regional offices by identifying them with IP subnets.

Dynamic scalability for data processing. Monitor tens of thousands of data points via a distributed and tiered system. Event-driven architecture allows extension of service polling and data collection frameworks, and flexible workflow integration. OpenNMS is an open-source network monitoring platform that helps you visualize and monitor everything on your local and distributed networks. OpenNMS offers comprehensive fault, performance, traffic monitoring, and alarm generation in one place. Highly customizable and scalable, OpenNMS integrates with your core business applications and workflows.