Network Server Management: Datadog vs. NetCrunch

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A server is a segment of computer hardware or software that provides functionality such as computing resources, data, programs, and services for other programs or devices called clients. This architecture is referred to as the client-server model. A client can behave as a server simultaneously if it shares resources with a client connected to the network.

There are a variety of servers, each of which performs different functions. A network may consist of multiple servers and types. The types of servers include file servers, applications servers, print servers, mail servers, web servers, Domain Name System (DNS) servers, proxy servers, database servers, monitoring and management servers and virtual servers.

In this day and age, with ever-increasing data consumption, enterprises are rapidly scaling to cater to growing infrastructure needs. Naturally, a larger number of servers are being introduced to networks to supply functionality for clients.

It is tiresome and expensive for information technology (IT) administrators to manually handle tasks linked with server management and critical applications. Network server management software enables IT administrators to simplify and quicken network health management and improve the efficiency, uptime and security of network servers.

What to Look for in Network Server Management Software

 When selecting a network server management platform, here is what you should look for:

• A network server management tool must offer a centralized view of your enterprise network across all servers. Data visualization enables easy monitoring and management of network health.
• Automation of lightweight and critical tasks is a must.
• Built-in reporting for advanced performance analytics is a necessity. 

In this guide, we will dive into all you need to know about Datadog and NetCrunch.

Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Server Management Software

Datadog Overview

Datadog is a software-as-a-Service (SaaS) modern monitoring and security platform that offers a centralized view of your systems, applications, services and teams, with an easy-to-use interface, effortless deployment, extensive breadth of technology coverage and minimal maintenance requirements.

The platform provides visualizations, metrics, and alerting to ensure your teams can maintain and optimize cloud or hybrid environments. Overall, Datadog enables effective communication and troubleshooting.

Datadog features

• With over 450 built-in, turn-key integrations, Datadog seamlessly brings together metrics and events across the full development and operations (DevOps) stack. The integrations include Microsoft Active Directory, Apache ActiveMQ, Adobe Experience Manager, Aerospike, Airbrake, Apache Airflow and Akamai DataStream.
• With full visibility into applications, you can monitor, troubleshoot and optimize performance.
• With automated tagging and correlation, you can see log data in context.
• You can enable post-mortems and root-cause analysis and track tens of thousands of metrics out-of-the-box.
• Datadog offers end-to-end user experience visibility with critical user journey monitoring, service-level agreement (SLA) and service-level objective (SLO) management and performance issue detection and alerting.
• With user experience metrics, you can prioritize business and engineering decisions.
• You can visualize traffic flow to understand performance by using tags to filter traffic.
• You can build real-time, interactive dashboards for data manipulation and graphing.
• You can snapshot potential issues and create an alert.
• You can receive critical alert notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.   
• Datadog offers flexible pricing plans to fit your scale. You can try the solution free of cost for two weeks and monitor as many servers as you please.

Also read: The Fundamentals of Good Service Level Agreements

 NetCrunch Overview

AdRem Software’s NetCrunch network monitoring platform allows you to monitor your enterprise infrastructure around the clock with a 360-degree view, visualize with maps and dashboards and easily configure alerts.

NetCrunch is a fully customizable monitoring platform that offers flexible visualization, comprehensive, agentless monitoring, alerting and policy-based configuration. NetCrunch Monitoring Suite is an all-in-one package that includes NetCrunch for SNMP Devices, NetCrunch for Network Infrastructure and NetCrunch Performance Monitor.

NetCrunch features

• The package comes with over 400 monitoring packs, services and sensors, over 8,700 pre-compiled Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Management Information Base (MIB) modules, and over 500 vendors supported out-of-the-box.
• The solution is suited to businesses of all sizes. You can use the solution to monitor as low as 50-100 devices and scale up to 10,000 devices at your convenience.
• NetCrunch Platform, the solution’s foundation module offers custom views, dashboards and top charts, graphical and intelligent maps, monitoring dependencies, active alerts view, alert escalation, alert correlation and desktop, web and mobile consoles.
• The SNMP & Core Monitoring module offers monitoring custom network services, customizable device SNMP views, MIB compiler, SNMP traps & notifications, switch monitoring & port mapping and printer monitoring.
• The Logs, Servers, Virtualization and Application Monitoring module offers server monitoring with Operating System (OS) performance monitors for Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, BSD and FreeBSD. The module also offers Structured Query Language (SQL) sensors and log monitoring.
• The Traffic Flow Analyzer module visualizes traffic for any custom view and supports IPFIX, NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow, cFlow, rFlow and NetStream.
•  The Advanced Alerting and Monitoring module offers advanced thresholds with baselines, advanced alerting conditions and business status nodes.
• The Advanced Configuration module offers custom monitoring policies, organizational groups, multi-user management, monitoring templates and dynamic folders.
• You can try the full version of NetCrunch Monitoring Suite for one month, free of cost, by downloading and installing the NetCrunch Platform Server. You must register your trial for the same. If you do not wish to register, you can try the package, free of cost, for one week.

Datadog vs. NetCrunch

Here is a tabular analysis of Datadog and NetCrunch Monitoring Suite:

It is clear to see that NetCrunch is the better overall solution. NetCrunch Monitoring Suite offers SNMP and core monitoring, logs, servers, virtualization and application monitoring, traffic flow visualization and analysis, advanced monitoring and alerting, and advanced configuration capabilities.

While NetCrunch Monitoring Suite is robust and well-crafted, the fact that it must be installed on every system from which you want to administer NetCrunch may be a deal-breaker – true remote management is out of reach without individual system installation.

Datadog is more convenient in this aspect as a Cloud Monitoring as a Service (CMaaS) solution. Datadog offers ten pricing plans to fit your scale, along with a two-week free trial and (potentially) volume discounts.

The network server management software’s features include 360-degree infrastructure visibility, 450+ built-in integrations, log management, traffic flow visualization, real-time interactive dashboards, critical issue alerting and root-cause analysis. 

Analyze both network server management platforms and purchase the solution that best represents your enterprise requirements.

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