8 IT Monitoring Tools to Watch in 2025
In any IT department, monitoring is no longer optional. Systems and applications are stitched together from cloud platforms, containers, and old-fashioned hardware — and when something breaks, the ability to see what’s happening across all layers can mean the difference between a quick fix and hours of downtime. The market for monitoring tools has grown accordingly, with open-source projects maturing and commercial platforms adding AI-driven features.
So, which tools deserve attention in 2025? Let’s look at eight of the most discussed options, split between the open-source community and enterprise-grade commercial products.
Open-Source Players
Grafana has become the de facto front end for time-series data. On its own, it doesn’t collect metrics — instead, it turns raw numbers from sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Elasticsearch into dashboards and charts that make sense at a glance. The tool is free and extremely flexible, but rolling it out across large environments takes effort. Cloud versions simplify this with usage-based pricing, while the community edition remains one of the strongest visualization layers available.
Nagios has been around for decades, and while the interface feels dated, the core remains solid. It runs active and passive checks, alerts admins before failures escalate, and scales from small shops using the free Nagios Core to large enterprises with Nagios XI. What it lacks in modern UI, it makes up for with stability and a massive plugin ecosystem.
Few open-source projects have shaped monitoring as much as Prometheus. Written in Go, it stores metrics in a time-series database and is particularly good at scraping microservices and containerized environments. It doesn’t handle long-term retention on its own, which means pairing it with other storage solutions, but its integration with Kubernetes makes it a default choice in cloud-native stacks.
Zabbix is the workhorse of traditional monitoring. It can track servers, virtual machines, and networks, with both agent and agentless approaches. Templates make it easier to start, while its API opens the door to automation. Unlike many commercial products, Zabbix doesn’t offer a hosted SaaS version — it’s open-source, free, and self-managed, which appeals to enterprises that want control and customization.
Commercial Platforms
Owned by Cisco, AppDynamics pushes the idea of full-stack observability. It doesn’t just monitor CPU or disk usage; it connects performance data back to application behavior. That makes it especially useful in complex enterprise systems where the real question is often why a slowdown happened, not just where. Pricing depends on edition, starting with basic infrastructure monitoring and scaling up to enterprise analytics.
Datadog has grown into one of the most recognizable SaaS monitoring names. Its strength lies in integrations — more than 450 of them, covering everything from Kubernetes clusters to Jenkins pipelines. Dashboards are customizable, machine learning adds anomaly detection, and DevOps teams often adopt it as their default observability hub. The free tier covers small setups, but serious use comes with per-host pricing that can add up quickly.
Dynatrace markets itself as an AI-first observability platform. It runs in SaaS or hybrid setups, connects to cloud-native stacks, and uses its own AI engine to highlight performance anomalies. Enterprises that want a “hands-off” approach to monitoring often choose Dynatrace, since it reduces manual rule writing and relies on automation. Pricing follows a usage-based model across monitoring, logging, and analytics.
New Relic started with application performance monitoring but has since broadened into infrastructure and log analysis. What sets it apart in 2025 is the AI layer: an assistant that lets engineers query metrics in natural language, detect anomalies, and drill into errors without memorizing query syntax. It’s a hybrid model with free and pay-as-you-go options, making it accessible but also powerful at enterprise scale.
Conclusion
The monitoring space is crowded, but each of these eight tools has its own niche. Open-source systems like Grafana, Prometheus, and Zabbix provide flexibility and control for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure. Commercial platforms such as Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic emphasize automation, scale, and AI features that reduce manual tuning.
The real question for IT leaders in 2025 isn’t which is the best tool overall, but which tool matches the team’s skills, budget, and infrastructure reality. The answer often lies in running a proof of concept with live data — because only then can a team see how well a tool fits into their workflow.