Cisco Network Monitoring Tools: Top 5 (2026) | MetricFire

Looking for the best Cisco network monitoring tools right now? This guide compares the top options for SNMP, auto-discovery, dashboards, and alerting. Plus how MetricFire fits in. Jump to the shortlist or the quick “how to choose” checklist below.

Introduction

In this article, we'll review the 5 best Cisco Switch monitoring tools for 2025. We'll provide an overview of switches, monitoring, and how to choose the best tool for you.

Key Takeaways

1. Network monitoring is crucial for the security and performance of a business.
2. Effective monitoring of Cisco switches is essential for maintaining network security, detecting potential threats, preventing data leaks, and safeguarding the organization's reputation and finances.
3. The article recommends five Cisco switch monitoring tools for 2025: MetricFire, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds NPM, Datadog Network Monitoring, and Cisco Network Assistant.
4. When choosing a monitoring tool, consider network size and pricing factors. 

What Is A Network Switch?

Network monitoring is critical to ensuring a business stays secure. Switches are crucial to the proper functioning of that network. Switches connect networks and serve as controllers that let organizations share resources and talk to each other for better productivity. 

Without them, organizations lack information sharing and resource allocation, not to mention unnecessary costs. We all want speedy access to information, and switches are integral to making that happen. However, like all the components of your IT network, switches need effective monitoring to build a sound security strategy.

MetricFire provides a hosted open-source Cisco network monitoring solution with minimal configuration. Book a demo, or sign up for the 14 day free trial.

Why Is Monitoring Important?

Organizations implement network monitoring for several reasons, all of which contribute to a business's overall success. One reason is to guarantee the organization's ideal execution. Minor changes, like files not loading quickly, can influence efficiency levels.

Equally important is the safety and security of your network and data. Network administration is about detecting those potential threats and stopping data leaks, preventing damage to your reputation and bottom line.

Network monitoring can also provide real cost-saving opportunities for businesses allocating resources. It can discover which network elements are being heavily used (or overused) and which are underused. These results can highlight unnecessary costs or identify network components needing an upgrade to maintain future performance. 

What counts as a Cisco network monitoring tool?

Monitoring your network is essential as it helps to thwart attacks and address problems before they become financial losses. Network monitoring typically covers all network devices and scrutinizes availability, CPU and memory utilization, disk usage, and configuration.

Many organizations focus on edge devices instead of the entire network when trying to tackle network management. Monitoring routers, firewalls, and switches will help identify most attacks and give IT leaders the insight they need to assess overall network performance.

How can you ensure you have the highest connectivity and security level and have selected the proper monitoring tool?

Here is our list of the five best Cisco switch monitoring tools in 2025.   

Best Cisco Switch Monitoring Tools

MetricFire

MetricFire's Hosted Graphite is an open-source monitoring tool that runs reliably on MetricFire's cloud infrastructure, so users don't have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure. People use Hosted Graphite to monitor the performance of their websites, applications, networks, IoT devices, and other infrastructure. Hosted Graphite is a good option for many types of time-series data, and monitoring your network gear is a classic use case.

You can start using Graphite with minimal configuration and effort by using a tool like CollectD or Diamond, and either a CollectD or a Diamond SNMP plugin. These plugins talk to your switches via SNMP, fetch network interface statistics, and report them to MetricFire via the Graphite protocol. 

MetricFire offers Dashboards as a Service with extensive features for creating customized dashboards and running queries to generate the metrics you want. This seamlessly works with Graphite so you can visualize metrics, customize charts and graphs, and run alerts. 

If you would like to learn more book a demo with us, or sign up for a two-week free trial today.

LogicMonitor

The LogicMonitor network monitoring tool discovers your devices automatically. When creating the network topology map and inventory, it notes each device's make and model so you can quickly identify and keep track of your Cisco switches.   

While the LogicMonitor tool communicates primarily with Cisco switches and routers, it has extra functionality when dealing with Cisco Nexus switches; here, it can perform configuration management and monitoring. It can track supervisor card status and redundancy states while troubleshooting fan performance and power draw.           

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

One Cisco network monitoring tool is the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM). SolarWinds NPM automatically discovers and identifies Cisco routers and switches.

Complete with customizable network topology and dashboards to visualize performance, this monitoring tool continuously polls the management information bases (MIBs) on your devices to get critical performance metrics to keep your system functioning optimally.

As a streamlined solution, SolarWinds NPM is a centralized monitoring tool that monitors all parts of your network. It also checks whether your software-defined networking (SDN) environment is performing correctly and provides total visibility into your Cisco ASA environment and infrastructure.

NPM from SolarWinds is a good option if you are looking for a monitoring tool built specifically for handling Cisco devices and environments. It is out-of-the-box compatible with the device agents already loaded onto each Cisco device.     

Datadog Network Monitoring

A cloud-based system designed for hybrid environments, the Datadog Network Monitoring solution combines health monitoring of all Cisco network devices with activity monitoring for all actions passing through network traffic.        

Datadog translates performance into easily understandable tags. This unified system allows quick visualization of your network devices and preemptively stops bandwidth saturation using AI-powered forecasting to ensure a high-quality service.

You can focus on the most insightful switch metrics and monitor all Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) devices and network traffic data side by side. Datadog provides extensibility through many APIs, with customizable graphs, metrics, and alerts.

Cisco Network Assistant

Optimized to work across most Cisco switches, routers, controllers, and access points, the Cisco Network Assistant is another network monitoring tool. The major downside is that it can only manage up to 80 devices.

Most would assume that a Cisco network monitoring system would facilitate the network management of Cisco devices. Still, with limited device capacity, it might not be the best choice for more extensive enterprise networks. 

The Cisco Network Assistant offers a device access service, so you can access a switch's management menu through the monitor dashboard. Using the direct link to the Cisco Active Advisor, you can view important warranty and contract information for any of your devices.

Are you interested in some eye-catching graphs? Use MetricFire's hosted Graphite and beautiful dashboard data visualizations to supercharge your network monitoring strategies.

How to choose a Cisco network monitoring tool

Two things should be top of mind when selecting the right network monitoring tool for your Cisco switches and other devices:

• Network size
• Pricing

Most of the options listed are great for any company size, but there are also tools for the less robust systems of smaller businesses. Take into consideration the size of your network and the number of sites and servers that you currently monitor. If applicable, think about how your organization is growing so you can future-proof your decision.

Of course, the budget also plays a large part in selecting a monitoring tool that is efficient and cost-effective. Take advantage of the free trials for these recommended tools to test them against your requirements before committing.

Network monitoring is not possible without protocols; ones like SNMP facilitate performance monitoring on Cisco products. It’s important to note that some tools work specifically to automate the network monitoring process, such as Solarwinds NPM, ManageEngine OpManager, PRTG Network Monitor, WhatsUp Gold, and Cisco Network Assistant.

This can be a critical factor in the decision-making process if automation is high on the priority list and relieves stress from your end-user. Monitoring is the most critical aspect of managing a network. Not only can network monitoring tools alert you when something is wrong, but they can help during troubleshooting and network planning. Whichever tool you choose, it should be capable of monitoring.

Using MetricFire as your Cisco Switch Monitoring Tool

MetricFire is the ultimate solution for organizations that need more resources for a full Cisco network monitoring team. This powerful monitoring platform is built on hosted versions of Graphite, and the dashboard monitors metrics after a quick installation of our agent.

Quick start: Cisco + MetricFire (SNMP → Graphite/Grafana)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.30.0-1_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i telegraf_1.30.0-1_amd64.deb

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf-1.30.0-1.x86_64.rpm

sudo yum localinstall telegraf-1.30.0-1.x86_64.rpm

[[outputs.graphite]]

servers = ["carbon.hostedgraphite.com:2003"]

prefix = "<YOUR_API_KEY>.telegraf"

Configure Your Running Instance of SNMP

This article assumes that you already have SNMP installed on your networking device(s), but here is a quick guide to installing/configuring SNMP in a Linux environment (specifically Ubuntu):

Install SNMP, SNMP daemon, and the MIBs package downloader (for some basic MIBs):

sudo apt install -y snmp snmpd snmp-mibs-downloader

Modify/configure the SNMP.conf file, generally located at: /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:

# Listen for connections from the local system only
agentAddress  udp:127.0.0.1:161

# System information
sysLocation    "Server Room"
sysContact     admin@example.com
sysName        MyComputer

# Access Control
rocommunity  public

# include all available OIDs
view all included .1

Then modify/configure the snmp.conf file, generally located at: /etc/snmp/snmp.conf:

mibs:

# expose basic MIBs
mibs +IF-MIB:HOST-RESOURCES-MIB:RFC1213-MIB:DISMAN-EVENT-MIB:DISMAN-SCHEDULE-MIB:TCP-MIB:UDP-MIB:SNMPv2-SMI:SNMPv2-TC:HOST-RESOURCES-TYPES

# optionally enable interfaces
interface eth0

• Start the SNMP service/daemon: sudo service snmpd restart
• If the instance is stuck or changes to the conf files are made, you probably need to kill running SNMP processes, then restart the SNMP daemon: sudo pkill snmpd
• See all available/exposed MIBs and OIDs: snmpwalk -v2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1
• NOTE: In the next step, you will use this list to configure the Telegraf SNMP plugin. Since we use a Graphite output (as outlined above), you can only define MIBs with numeric values (integers/counters/etc.)

Configure the Telegraf SNMP Input Plugin:

Telegraf has many input plugins that can collect a wide range of data from many popular technologies and 3rd party sources. In this example, we'll demonstrate how to connect Telegraf to a local instance of SNMP.

All you need to do is search for the inputs.nginx section in your telegraf.conf file, uncomment the [[inputs.snmp]] line, and uncomment/configure the agent's line:

[[inputs.snmp]]
   agents = ["udp://127.0.0.1:161"]

Now, you must configure SNMP fields that map to the OIDs from your SNMP walk output and define metric names.

Below is an example of a basic configuration, but your setup will likely differ depending on the OIDs defined in your snmpwalk output:

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrSystemUptime.0"
  name = "hrSystemUptime"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "SNMPv2-MIB::sysUpTime.0"
  name = "sysUpTime"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "DISMAN-EVENT-MIB::sysUpTimeInstance"
  name = "sysUpTimeInstance"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "TCP-MIB::tcpActiveOpens.0"
  name = "tcpActiveOpens"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "UDP-MIB::udpInDatagrams.0"
  name = "udpInDatagrams"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "SNMPv2-MIB::sysORLastChange.0"
  name = "sysORLastChange"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifIndex.1"
  name = "ifIndex"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifType.1"
  name = "ifType"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifMtu.1"
  name = "ifMtu"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifSpeed.1"
  name = "ifSpeed"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifAdminStatus.1"
  name = "ifAdminStatus"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOperStatus.1"
  name = "ifOperStatus"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifLastChange.1"
  name = "ifLastChange"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInOctets.1"
  name = "ifInOctets"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInUcastPkts.1"
  name = "ifInUcastPkts"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInNUcastPkts.1"
  name = "ifInNUcastPkts"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInDiscards.1"
  name = "ifInDiscards"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInErrors.1"
  name = "ifInErrors"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInUnknownProtos.1"
  name = "ifInUnknownProtos"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.1"
  name = "ifOutOctets"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutUcastPkts.1"
  name = "ifOutUcastPkts"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutNUcastPkts.1"
  name = "ifOutNUcastPkts"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutDiscards.1"
  name = "ifOutDiscards"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutErrors.1"
  name = "ifOutErrors"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutQLen.1"
  name = "ifOutQLen"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "SNMPv2-MIB::sysServices.0"
  name = "sysServices"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "SNMPv2-MIB::snmpOutGenErrs.0"
  name = "snmpOutGenErrs"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "RFC1213-MIB::ipForwarding.0"
  name = "ipForwarding"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "RFC1213-MIB::ipInAddrErrors.0"
  name = "ipInAddrErrors"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrMemorySize.0"
  name = "hrMemorySize"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrStorageUsed.53"
  name = "hrStorageUsed"

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  oid = "HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrDeviceStatus.196608"
  name = "hrDeviceStatus"

Save the file, and now you can manually run Telegraf using the following command to see if there are any configuration errors in the output:

telegraf --config telegraf.conf

With the above configuration, Telegraf forwarded 32 metrics to the configured data source; this is what they look like in the Graphite format:

telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.hrDeviceStatus
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.hrMemorySize
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.hrStorageUsed
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.hrSystemUptime
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifAdminStatus
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInDiscards
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInErrors
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInNUcastPkts
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInOctets
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInUcastPkts
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifInUnknownProtos
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifIndex
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifLastChange
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifMtu
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOperStatus
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutDiscards
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutErrors
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutNUcastPkts
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutOctets
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutQLen
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifOutUcastPkts
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifSpeed
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ifType
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ipForwarding
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.ipInAddrErrors
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.snmpOutGenErrs
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.sysORLastChange
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.sysServices
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.sysUpTime
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.sysUpTimeInstance
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.tcpActiveOpens
telegraf.<host>.127_0_0_1.snmp.udpInDatagrams

The official GitHub repository contains additional configuration options and a complete list of metrics the SNMP plugin returns.

FAQs

Q1: What’s the difference between Cisco network monitoring and generic network monitoring?
A: Cisco monitoring emphasizes device-specific MIBs, IOS/NX-OS nuances, and features like ASA visibility—on top of standard SNMP, interface, and topology data.

Q2: Which metrics matter most for Cisco switches?
A: Interface up/down, errors/discards, utilization, CPU/memory, temperature, power/fan status, PoE draw, and stacking/supervisor status for platforms like Nexus.

Q3: Do I need SNMPv3?
A: Yes—prefer SNMPv3 for auth/priv security; fall back to v2c only for legacy gear while restricting community strings and access lists.

Q4: How do dashboards help day-to-day?
A: Prebuilt Grafana dashboards surface hotspots (e.g., top interfaces by errors/usage) and speed RCA with correlated views and alerts.

Q5: What’s a quick way to try this without self-hosting?
A: Use MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite + Hosted Grafana; collect switch metrics via CollectD/Diamond SNMP plugins and start with a basic interface dashboard.

Conclusion

Effective monitoring of Cisco switches is vital for ensuring a business network's security, performance, and productivity. Organizations can proactively detect and address potential threats by utilizing the proper monitoring tools, optimizing resource allocation, and preventing costly downtime. The article highlighted five top Cisco switch monitoring tools for 2025, including MetricFire, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds NPM, Datadog Network Monitoring, and Cisco Network Assistant. Factors like network size and pricing should be considered when selecting a tool. We recommend Hosted Graphite, along with a free trial for evaluation. By investing in robust monitoring capabilities, businesses can ensure the smooth operation of their networks and safeguard their valuable assets.

Sign up for a MetricFire free trial and book a demo and talk to the MetricFire team about how you can start network monitoring right now.