About
A review desk for the monitor itself
Most writing about monitoring software describes features. We write about what it is like to keep the thing running.
Why this site exists
A check interval is the gap between two looks at the same thing: every sixty seconds, every five minutes. Pick it too long and you miss the outage; too short and the monitoring server becomes the busiest machine in the rack. That trade-off is a fair summary of the whole job, and it is the reason for the name. Choosing a monitoring system is easy to do badly, because the pain arrives months later — when history tables fill a disk, when a poller falls behind, when an upgrade needs a weekend nobody budgeted for, or when the team starts ignoring alerts because nine out of ten are noise.
Vendor pages do not talk about any of that, and many comparison sites simply restate vendor pages. Scannethub tries to fill the gap with reviews written from the operator’s chair: what it takes to reach a first useful dashboard, how storage grows, how the tool behaves when the network between the server and a remote site goes down, and who should not use it at all.
Who writes it
Scannethub is edited by SABELLE, CLAUDINE, CATHERINE, JEANNE ALARY, who writes and updates the reviews, comparisons and guides and is responsible for every claim on the site. The editorial focus is the kind of environment most of our readers run: a few dozen to a few thousand hosts, a mix of Linux and Windows servers, switches and firewalls from more than one vendor, and a small team where the person who picks the monitoring tool is also the person who gets paged by it.
We do not claim first-hand experience of every product at every scale. Reviews are built from the vendor’s own documentation, release notes and pricing pages, from public demos and trials where the vendor offers them, and from what admins report in forums, issue trackers and community docs. Where a detail isn’t in the vendor’s public documentation — maximum supported hosts, licensing tiers, price points — we say so and point you to the vendor’s current page rather than guess.
What we cover, and what we do not
The catalog is deliberately small: 11 products, mostly self-hosted and open-source (Zabbix, Nagios Core, Icinga, Checkmk, LibreNMS), plus three commercial platforms (PRTG, ManageEngine OpManager and SolarWinds NPM) that we treat as the “when paying makes sense” alternative. Alongside them sit three tools that are not monitors at all but that monitoring admins reach for: Angry IP Scanner, for finding what is on a network before it goes into monitoring, Wireshark, for seeing what is really on the wire when a check fails, and LizardSystems Network Scanner, a closed-source Windows tool (free for personal use, paid for business) for finding shared folders, FTP and web servers and checking who can access them. We would rather keep eleven reviews current than publish fifty that drift out of date.
We are not a vendor, a reseller or a software mirror. We host no files of any kind. Every product link points to the maker’s own website, and our where-to-get page explains how to verify what you fetch from there.
How the site is funded
The site may run advertising campaigns to reach readers. At the moment no link on the site is an affiliate link and we earn no commission from any vendor; every product link goes directly to the vendor’s official site. No vendor pays for inclusion, placement or a better readout, and none sees a review before it is published. If that ever changes, it will be stated on theaffiliate disclosure page first, and the scoring rules are on the methodology page.
Corrections
Monitoring products change quickly: licenses move (Zabbix went from GPLv2 to AGPLv3 with version 7.0), editions get renamed, and defaults shift between releases. If something here is wrong or stale, write toeditor@scannethub.biz. We fix factual errors and note the update date on the page.