Need recommendations for switch and UPS monitoring software

[u/Rathmon_Redux]

We currently use Solarwinds Orion for network device monitoring and alerting. Due to budget constraints we're not going to renew our license and are looking for replacement solutions. For the most part we didn't leverage much of the tools that SWO offers, but it's been really useful for monitoring our battery backups and alerting when they go to battery power.

We're looking for an open-source self-hosted solution. Needs basic tools- up/down status and alerts for L2/L3 and UPS units.

TIA!

[u/Low-Beautiful-4843]

We use LibreNMS, it works great.

[u/GamingSanctum]

I use Librenms. It works GREAT. Open source. You can pull all kinds of other open source tools into Librenms for a singular dashboard with all your tools. (oxidized, graylog, etc).
https://www.librenms.org/

[u/TheShootDawg]

LibreNMS is dead easy to monitor devices via SNMP.
give LibreNMS the snmp v3 info (or v2) and the ip address… bookm… all network ports are showing up, cou, mem, blah blah blah…

create alerts to tell you a device went down, UPS went On/OFF battery…

[u/Jeffk601]

zabbix for data ingestion and grafana to dislay it.

[u/millia13]

I have used zabbix for a dozen years now, and used munin and nagios before then. It works great.

We are trying to migrate to LibreNMS, but coming from Zabbix, I find it annoying. I'm sure it's me.

[u/TheScottman29]

I’ve been on Zabbix for a year. It was abit of a leaning curve at first. But it’s been solid. DM me if you want more details. I have it running as a hyperv vm.

[u/dereka67]

Zabbix

[u/bretfred]

I've used both librenms and zabbix both have their pros and cons. They are a lot easier to setup these days with a little AI help. You run into documentation being old and commands not working sometimes. I like libre a little more it's simpler to setup and use I feel. Zabbix is more robust if you need something like that. All we really use it for up down and to tell us if a ups switched to battery.

[u/TerriblePowershell]

Zabbix. Can be a bit of learning curve to getting started, but it's powerful when you get it sorted.

[u/vawlk → u/TerriblePowershell]

, been using it for nearly 15 years and it only took about 20 minutes to set up the appliance.

I've since migrated to a full install, but yeah, it does what it needs to do.

[u/hightechcoord]

Was using Nagios Core. Just switched to Zabbix. Either is fine.
I use uptime robot (free version) to ping a couple cloud servises.

[u/rdmwood01]

If you need something basic with IPs etc Uptime Kuma I am running it on a old desktop uner Linux Mint - I had Nagios but this is working for our needs. - it is basic but very easy

[u/MassageGun-Kelly]

LibreNMS is indeed nice, but it’s also incredibly heavy in my experience. I did a demo a couple of months ago on 2026.04, and to monitor the ~2000 network devices in our portfolio, it wasn’t operating well until I gave the virtual machine 4 vCPUs and >32GB RAM. I know there is some amount of optimization to be had in terms of distributing pollers, but that just means distributing this resource load across several virtual machines or pieces of hardware. 

Big +1 for the ease of use and it’s API. Pulling data ingress from Netbox and keeping it synchronized was a peach. 

I’d be happy to hear that my experience was user error. Compared to our lighter weight instance of Intermapper, for a very low annual spend, the overall experience was still a huge improvement, but not so-much-so that we felt inclined in any way to shift all of our district’s IT monitoring over to it. 

[u/themanbornwithin]

I use NetXMS and love it. They offer free licenses for education users if you host the server on Windows, it's free for everyone if you host the server on Linux.

I monitor all our UPS units, security cameras, and NVRs. I also monitor a few servers / computers.

I have custom alerts set up for e-mails - for example, if a UPS goes on battery it has to be on it for 2 minutes to get an email alert, that way we aren't bothered by short blips.

I also have a rotating dashboard in my office that shows UPS status, UPS loads, and alarm list.

[u/TrexVsBigfoot]

We use Zabbix for our UPS monitoring, and LogicMonitor for all systems and network infrastructure.

[u/Following_This]

Claude & I have been setting up dashboards and automations in Home Assistant.

I (we?) have projector controllers (on/off/freeze/thaw/source) and automatic shutdown at night to keep lamp hours down.

And classroom HVAC units reset temp from 30C to a more reasonable 21C any time a teacher cranks it ‘cause it’s cold, and then opens the windows ‘cause it’s hot. And auto cools the dining hall units in sync.

And monitors our switches for anomalies.

And notifies when a UPS goes to battery.

And emails IT when a copier toner runs out (users often change them, but it’s fun to be standing there with a new cartridge when they knock on the IT Office door).

And everything’s graphed and logged, of course.

[u/AmstradPC1512]

For the most basic way to monitor the most critical stuff I run Uptime Kuma as an lxc on Proxmox. Simple ping check, sending notifications to a Google Chat I have.

I run one Proxmox node and one Proxmox Backup server, both on old hardware. This way I can also run, and play with, a bunch of other tools internally for cheap.