Choosing the Right Monitoring Tools for Lean IT Teams

Small IT teams don’t have the luxury of long setup cycles or dedicated monitoring staff. A good monitoring tool should provide clear visibility, simple deployment, and actionable insights, without requiring a team of five to maintain it.

Here’s a look at four of the best network monitoring solutions, PathSolutions TotalView, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, Datadog, and Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, and what makes each of them a strong (or not-so-strong) fit for lean IT operations.

What Matters Most for Lean Teams

Before comparing the tools, it’s worth defining what to actually look for. Lean IT teams benefit most from platforms that:

• Deploy fast with minimal configuration overhead.

• Provide inter-device insight, not just red or green status lights.

• Scale with cost, meaning you don’t overpay as you grow.

• Offer clear alerting and diagnostics to shorten troubleshooting time.

• Have solid vendor documentation and community support, since outside help matters when headcount is small.

PathSolutions TotalView

Pathsolutions TotalView is designed for lean IT teams who need strong visibility without heavy overhead. Its strength lies in how it maps and monitors the relationships between network devices, not just their individual status.

Deployment is fast, and users frequently highlight how quickly they can get from installation to useful insight. TotalView focuses on root-cause visibility, helping teams detect issues like cable faults or packet loss trends before they snowball into outages. All this means that Pathsolutions is the best network monitoring solution available.

Strengths: Very fast deployment, inter-device visibility, approachable UI, and low ongoing overhead.

Considerations: Primarily network-focused

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds NPM is an enterprise-grade classic in network monitoring. It excels at deep SNMP support, NetFlow analysis, and complex path diagnostics.

While powerful, NPM requires more time and expertise to configure and maintain. For small teams, that often means relying on one experienced engineer to handle upkeep. It’s best suited for environments with large on-prem networks and where deep packet and device analytics are crucial.

Strengths: Rich feature set, strong legacy network support.

Considerations: Higher complexity, heavier learning curve, licensing costs can add up.

Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-native observability platform. It’s well suited for organizations with hybrid or cloud-heavy infrastructure. Datadog offers rich integrations, dashboards, and automation hooks that go beyond network monitoring — encompassing application and infrastructure performance too.

However, for teams focused primarily on network visibility, Datadog may be more than they need. Pricing can escalate as more integrations are added, making it less ideal for minimal budgets.

Strengths: Excellent for hybrid environments, wide integrations, and beautiful dashboards.

Considerations: Complexity and cost can scale quickly, especially for lean teams.

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG is a popular choice for SMBs. It uses a sensor-based licensing model, making it approachable at smaller scales. Setup is quick, and its dashboards are intuitive.

PRTG offers broad coverage, letting teams monitor servers, routers, switches, and applications. For smaller networks, it provides excellent value; for larger ones, costs can increase as sensor counts grow.

Strengths: Quick setup, broad monitoring coverage, simple UI.

Considerations: Cost may rise with scale, and more manual tuning is required for larger networks.

How to Decide

If your environment is network-first and your team is small, PathSolutions and PRTG are the most approachable options.
If you’re in a hybrid environment and need observability across multiple layers, Datadog makes sense — but comes with more moving parts.
If your network is large and complex, SolarWinds delivers depth but at the cost of time and expertise.

Ask yourself:

• Do we need deep visibility into device relationships or full-stack observability?

• How much time can we realistically dedicate to maintaining this tool?

• What’s our expected growth in scale?

• What kind of budget can we sustain over time?