The Best Storage Monitoring Tools

We all know that storage systems and the data they contain are essential to application performance, business continuity, and overall organizational stability. Today’s storage environments span SAN, NAS, virtualized systems, and cloud platforms, and that makes them increasingly challenging to manage and monitor effectively.

Based on our independent research, selection requirements, and rating methodologies, these are the best storage monitoring tools on the market today:

1. ManageEngine OpManager EDITOR’S CHOICE Provides strong fault management, performance tracking, and capacity visibility across SAN, NAS, and virtualized environments. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) Excels at monitoring cloud-based and hybrid storage environments. Provides end-to-end visibility into storage performance, availability, and resource utilization. Start a 30-day free trial.
3. PRTG Network Monitor (FREE TRIAL) Suitable for monitoring storage performance and health across small to mid-sized environments through customizable sensors that track capacity, latency, throughput, and device status. Start a 30-day free trial.
4. LogicMonitor Provides comprehensive monitoring of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid storage infrastructures with strong automation, predictive analytics, and capacity forecasting capabilities.
5. Datadog Best for cloud-native and distributed storage environments. It delivers real-time observability and performance analytics across storage, applications, and infrastructure.
6. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor Specializes in deep SAN and NAS monitoring. Offers detailed insights into storage performance, capacity planning, and vendor-specific storage array health.

As a storage admin, infrastructure engineer, or SRE, it is critical not to operate in a reactive mode when it comes to storage issues. You need the visibility to anticipate problems before they impact services. Without that level of insight, it becomes difficult to detect early warning signs such as rising latency, capacity pressure, or failing disks before they escalate into outages.

Storage monitoring tools give you a clear, real-time view of what is happening across your storage systems. A storage monitoring tool can help your organization avoid the following pain points:

• Unexpected storage outages caused by undetected disk, controller, or array failures
• Application slowdowns due to high latency or IOPS bottlenecks
• Capacity exhaustion that leads to system downtime or failed write operations
• Lack of visibility across SAN, NAS, virtualized, and cloud storage environments
• Delayed detection of performance degradation trends over time
• Inefficient storage utilization resulting in wasted infrastructure costs
• Inability to forecast future storage needs accurately
• Fragmented monitoring across multiple vendors and platforms
• Reactive troubleshooting instead of proactive issue prevention
• Increased risk of data loss or service disruption during peak demand periods

In this article, we explore the best storage monitoring tools available today. We curated them specifically for how well they help you track performance, manage capacity, and maintain reliability across complex environments.

If you need to know more, explore our vendor highlight section just below, or skip to our detailed vendor reviews.

Storage monitoring tools highlights

Key points to consider before choosing storage monitoring tools

Here are the key factors you should keep in mind when choosing storage monitoring tools:

• Depth of storage visibility: Ability to monitor SAN, NAS, cloud, and virtualized storage with detailed metrics such as latency, IOPS, throughput, and disk health.
• Early warning and proactive monitoring: Capability to detect issues such as rising latency, capacity pressure, or failing disks before they impact services.
• Capacity planning and forecasting: Built-in analytics to predict storage growth and prevent unexpected exhaustion.
• Performance monitoring accuracy: Real-time and historical insights into bottlenecks affecting application performance.
• Scalability: Ability to support growing environments across multiple sites, data centers, or cloud platforms.
• Multi-vendor support: Compatibility with different storage vendors and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Alerting and notification system: Customizable alerts with escalation policies to ensure timely response to incidents.
• Ease of deployment and use: Simplicity of setup, configuration, dashboards, and day-to-day operations.
• Integration capabilities: Ability to integrate with ITSM, DevOps, cloud platforms, and observability tools.
• Reporting and analytics: Clear dashboards and reports for capacity trends, performance insights, and SLA tracking.
• Automation and remediation support: Options for automated responses or workflow triggers when issues are detected.
• Cost and licensing model: Total cost of ownership, including scaling costs as infrastructure grows.

To dive deeper into how we incorporate these into our research and review methodology, skip to our detailed methodology section.

The Best Storage Monitoring Tools

1. ManageEngine OpManager (FREE TRIAL)

Best for: Organizations looking to manage storage alongside servers, networks, applications, and cloud resources

Price: Standard edition starts at $95 annually for 10 devices

ManageEngine OpManager is an infrastructure monitoring platform that monitors your entire IT environment. The name OpManager is short for Operations Manager. ManageEngine positioned the product as a tool for IT operations teams that need to monitor and manage the day-to-day health, performance, and availability of their infrastructure. As the product evolved, it expanded beyond basic network monitoring to include servers, virtualization, cloud resources, applications, and storage monitoring.

OpManager supports a wide range of storage environments, including SAN, NAS, RAID arrays, virtualized storage, cloud storage, and Fibre Channel networks, and works with many of the industry’s leading storage vendors. You can monitor performance indicators such as latency, IOPS, throughput, disk utilization, capacity usage, storage growth, and available space. The platform also monitors the health of your storage infrastructure to identify issues such as failing disks, controller problems, RAID errors, power supply failures, or other hardware-related concerns before they affect users or critical applications.

One of the interesting things we found out about OpManager is its proactive approach to storage management. You can configure alerts to notify you when performance or capacity thresholds are reached.

However, remember that OpManager is an infrastructure monitoring platform with storage monitoring capabilities. So you may not find the storage-specific analytics and troubleshooting capabilities found in specialized tools. The implication is that if you manage large storage environments and need detailed insights into storage performance, LUN activity, or advanced troubleshooting capabilities, OpManager may not provide the same depth of insight as tools built specifically for storage management.

ManageEngine OpManager’s key features

• Performance Monitoring: The platform continuously tracks critical storage performance metrics to identify bottlenecks.
• Capacity Monitoring and Forecasting: Provides real-time visibility into storage utilization and growth trends. Its AI and ML-powered forecasting capabilities predict when storage resources are likely to reach critical capacity thresholds.
• Storage Health Monitoring: The platform monitors the overall health of storage infrastructure, including RAID status, controller health, battery status, port availability, disk failures, power supply issues, fan health, and SAN errors.
• Intelligent Alerting System: You can configure threshold-based alerts to notify administrators when performance, health, or capacity metrics exceed predefined limits.
• Custom Dashboards and Reporting: Dedicated storage dashboards provide a centralized view of storage utilization, performance trends, I/O statistics, RAID summaries, and device health.
• Cloud Storage Monitoring: Through integration with Applications Manager, OpManager can monitor storage services running in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Topology Mapping and Root Cause Analysis: Built-in visualization tools and topology maps help you understand storage dependencies, identify bottlenecks, trace faults, and accelerate troubleshooting.

Unique buying proposition

OpManager’s strongest differentiator is its AI and ML-powered capacity forecasting. It analyzes historical usage patterns to predict future storage consumption. It can forecast when your storage resources are likely to reach critical utilization thresholds such as 80%, 90%, and full capacity.

OpManager’s value is not just that it can predict future storage problems; it can also help you act on those predictions before they become business-impacting issues. These forecasts become significantly more useful when integrated with OpManager’s intelligent alerting capabilities.

You can configure alerts to notify your team when forecasted growth indicates that a critical threshold will be reached within a specified timeframe. When an alert is triggered, the platform can initiate predefined workflows to perform routine corrective actions or notify the appropriate teams automatically.

Feature-in-focus: Topology mapping and root cause analysis

Topology mapping and root cause analysis are OpManager features for visually showing how your storage infrastructure components are connected. OpManager’s topology maps provide a visual representation of how the various components of your storage infrastructure connect to and depend on one another. This feature is important because it significantly reduces the time spent troubleshooting storage issues. You can visually follow the path of a problem through your infrastructure and quickly pinpoint its source.

Why do we recommend it?

We recommend ManageEngine OpManager because it provides broad visibility across your entire IT environment. You can monitor storage systems alongside servers, networks, applications, and cloud resources. The platform supports a wide range of storage technologies and vendors.

The platform supports monitoring SANs, NAS devices, RAID arrays, tape libraries, Fibre Channel switches, and storage systems from more than 30 vendors. It also supports many major storage vendors including Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM, Pure Storage, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, Oracle, Synology, and QNAP.

Another reason we recommend OpManager is that it is backed by ManageEngine, a globally recognized IT management vendor with a strong track record in network, infrastructure, and operations monitoring. The platform’s widespread adoption and reputation for reliability provide additional assurance that it can continue to meet your monitoring needs as your storage environment grows.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend OpManager for mid-sized to large organizations that want to monitor storage as part of a broader infrastructure monitoring strategy. It is excellent for monitoring storage, servers, networks, cloud resources, and multi-vendor storage environments.

OpManager comes in Standard, Professional, or Enterprise editions. OpManager storage monitoring is not included as a standard feature in the base editions; ManageEngine offers it as an optional module that can be attached to any edition depending on your monitoring requirements. If you only need monitoring for a single site, you’d need to choose the Professional Edition. Larger enterprises with distributed environments should opt for the Enterprise Edition.

OpManager uses a device-based licensing model. You pay based on the number of devices being monitored. The company offers both subscription and perpetual licensing options. Current entry pricing starts at approximately $95 annually for 10 devices for the Standard Edition, $145 annually for 10 devices for the Professional Edition, and $4,595 annually for 250 devices for the Enterprise Edition.

2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL)

Best for: Organizations with hybrid, multi-vendor IT infrastructure.

Price: Professional plan starts at $49 per month

Site24x7 is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that monitors the performance, availability, and health of the IT environment, including networks, servers, applications, cloud services, containers, and storage systems. It was launched by ManageEngine in 2009 as a SaaS-based monitoring service for websites and online services. Over time, it evolved into a full cloud monitoring and observability platform.

Both OpManager and Site24x7 are products of ManageEngine.  However, Site24x7 approaches storage differently. It monitors storage as one component of a broader cloud and infrastructure observability platform. Its storage monitoring is more focused on metrics such as disk usage, storage capacity, IOPS, throughput, availability, cloud storage performance, and server-attached storage health. It has a stronger use case for workloads that run in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, containers, or hybrid environments.

The platform utilizes machine learning-based forecasting to analyze data growth trends, predicting exactly when a storage volume will run out of space. You can configure threshold-based alerts to notify you when storage utilization reaches critical levels or when performance metrics deviate from normal behavior. Through its dashboards and reports, you can analyze historical storage trends, forecast capacity requirements, and gain visibility into how storage performance impacts the rest of your infrastructure.

On the other hand, because Site24x7 relies on standard SNMP polling, cloud APIs, and general server agents, it excels at high-level metrics (capacity tracking, IOPS, and throughput), but often fails to provide granular insights into proprietary storage hardware architectures. For instance, it may not adequately capture internal storage fabric health, specific RAID controller telemetry, disk shelf connectivity issues, or microcode-level errors.

Site24x7’s key features

• SNMP-Based Custom Monitoring: Monitor virtually any storage device and storage metric as long as the device supports SNMP.
• RAID Monitoring Templates: Come with preconfigured templates for popular RAID solutions from vendors such as NetApp, Dell, EMC Isilon, HP, Synology, and QNAP.
• Storage Performance Monitoring: Tracks critical storage metrics including disk activity, disk read/write operations, storage volume capacity, iSCSI operations, FCP operations, cache age, battery status, and failed disk counts.
• Storage Capacity Monitoring: Helps you monitor available disk space, storage utilization, and capacity trends to prevent storage shortages.
• Topology Maps and Visualization Dashboards: Provides topology maps, Layer 2 maps, and customizable dashboards that help you visualize storage devices, connections, health, and performance from a single interface.
• Alerting and Notifications: Supports traps, alerts, notifications, and reports that help you quickly identify storage issues and respond before they impact users.
• Multi-Vendor Storage Support: Offers out-of-the-box support for a wide range of storage vendors across RAID systems, NAS devices, tape libraries, SAN switches, and storage arrays.
• Centralized Monitoring Console: Consolidates storage availability, health, performance, and capacity metrics into a single dashboard for easier management.
• Health Monitoring: Monitors hardware-related metrics such as battery health, active disks, failed disks, and storage device status to help maintain storage reliability.
• Reporting and Performance Analysis: Generates performance reports that help identify trends, analyze storage behavior, and support capacity planning.

Unique buying proposition

Site24x7’s biggest selling point as a storage monitoring tool is its ability to provide flexible, cloud-based monitoring for a wide range of storage technologies. Using SNMP-based monitoring, you can monitor virtually any supported storage device and customize the metrics that matter most to your environment. The platform also includes preconfigured templates for popular storage vendors and technologies, including RAID systems, NAS devices, SAN switches, storage arrays, and tape libraries.

Furthermore, Site24x7 differentiates itself through AIOps-driven predictive capacity planning. The platform’s machine-learning algorithms analyze historical data consumption trends to forecast precisely when a storage tier will run out of space.

Feature-in-focus: SNMP-based custom storage monitoring

This is the foundation of Site24x7’s storage monitoring capabilities and the feature that enables most of its other storage functions. You can monitor virtually any storage device that supports SNMP without being tied to specific storage hardware.

With this flexibility, you can track custom storage metrics across RAID arrays, NAS devices, SAN switches, storage arrays, and tape libraries, even in environments with multiple vendors and diverse storage technologies. If your organization is a mixed-vendor infrastructure, this flexibility is arguably the feature that most distinguishes Site24x7 from many competing storage monitoring solutions.

Why do we recommend it?

We recommend Site24x7 storage monitoring because of its cloud-native agility. Although both OpManager and Site24x7 belong to the same parent corporation (Zoho), OpManager is fundamentally a traditional, on-premises software deployment. Site24x7, on the other hand, is built from the ground up as a SaaS platform. So you would expect zero hosting overhead, effortless scaling across globally distributed offices, and instant, painless integration with modern cloud storage architectures.

Site24x7 outshines OpManager by breaking down the wall between pure infrastructure data and digital experience monitoring. OpManager treats storage as a network engineering asset, viewing it through isolated SNMP polling and physical device metrics. Site24x7 integrates storage into a broader full-stack observability fabric. It provides a lightweight, immediately modern solution that tracks the entire data ecosystem from the cloud to the data center floor.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend Site24x7 as a storage monitoring tool for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and mid-market organizations with hybrid, multi-vendor IT infrastructure. It specifically appeals to lean IT operations, DevOps, and cloud engineering teams who manage a mixed bag of local servers, network-attached storage (NAS/SAN), and public cloud storage (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud).

Site24x7 uses a subscription-based SaaS licensing model. If you’re evaluating the software, you can start with a 30-day free trial that does not require a credit card. The service is available through several product categories, but for storage monitoring, the All-in-One Monitoring plans are the most relevant because they integrate infrastructure, network, server, application, and storage monitoring into a single cloud-based platform. You can also expand your monitoring coverage by purchasing additional monitor packs and add-ons as your environment grows.

The entry-level Lite plan starts at $10 per month (or $9 per month when billed annually) and includes monitoring for two servers and five websites. Most organizations looking to monitor storage infrastructure will find the Professional plan more appropriate. It starts at $49 per month (or $42 per month when billed annually), and includes monitoring for five servers, ten network components, one application, log monitoring capabilities, and additional infrastructure monitoring features. Since storage monitoring is delivered as part of the broader infrastructure monitoring package, there is no separate storage monitoring license to purchase.

However, larger organizations can go for the Enterprise plan. It starts at $625 per month and is designed for environments with extensive monitoring requirements. In addition to everything included in the Professional plan, it adds advanced capabilities such as anomaly detection, event correlation, infrastructure event management, and network configuration management features.

Site24x7 Start a 30-day FREE Trial

3. Paessler PRTG Network Monitor (FREE TRIAL)

Best for: Sysadmins, network managers, and IT infrastructure teams in SMBs and mid-market enterprises.

Price: PRTG 500 starts at $200 per month, paid annually

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is an infrastructure monitoring platform that monitors the health, performance, and availability of your IT infrastructure. Although it began as a network monitoring solution, it has evolved into a unified monitoring platform capable of monitoring networks, servers, applications, virtualization platforms, cloud services, databases, and storage systems.

Paessler can monitor storage arrays, SANs, NAS devices, RAID systems, storage pools, virtual storage environments, and cloud-based storage services. It collects real-time data from these systems and tracks important metrics, including response time, read and write speeds, latency, throughput, CPU usage, and memory utilization.

PRTG accomplishes all these through its sensor-based monitoring architecture. Sensors are specialized monitoring components that collect data from storage devices using technologies such as SNMP, WMI, SSH, REST APIs, and vendor-specific protocols. Each sensor monitors a specific metric or resource.

The collected data is then displayed through dashboards, maps, graphs, and visual reports that make trends and abnormalities easier to spot. For example, if your storage latency suddenly increases or read/write speeds begin to decline, you can quickly identify the issue and investigate the affected device or resource.

However, just like OpManager and Site24x7, the biggest limitation of PRTG as a storage monitoring tool is that it is a general-purpose infrastructure monitoring platform. So don’t expect the same level of storage-specific analytics, advanced SAN diagnostics, and vendor-specific troubleshooting capabilities found in specialized storage monitoring tools.

Paessler PRTG’s key features

• Storage Monitoring: Monitors a wide range of storage environments, including physical and virtual servers, NAS, SAN, cloud storage, and content delivery networks (CDNs) from a single platform.
• Real-Time Performance Monitoring: Continuously tracks critical storage metrics such as response time, latency, CPU usage, memory utilization, and overall system performance.
• Storage Capacity Monitoring: Monitors storage usage and available capacity, to identify low storage space before it impacts applications and users.
• Storage Bottleneck Detection: Identifies performance bottlenecks and resource constraints that could slow down storage operations or affect service availability.
• Customizable Sensor-Based Monitoring: Uses specialized sensors to monitor individual storage devices and metrics.
• Visual Dashboards and Graphs: Displays storage performance data through intuitive dashboards and real-time graphs.
• Proactive Alerting: Sends customizable alerts when storage performance or capacity exceeds predefined thresholds to enable faster response to potential problems.
• Historical Data and Trend Analysis: Stores monitor data over time, so that you can analyze historical performance trends and support capacity planning.
• Downtime Prevention: Provides continuous monitoring and actionable insights that help you detect issues early, reduce unplanned downtime, and maintain optimal storage performance.

Unique buying proposition

Based on Paessler’s product documentation and how PRTG is positioned in the market, I would argue that PRTG’s unique selling point is its sensor-based monitoring architecture. The software uses hundreds of specialized sensors, with each sensor designed to monitor a specific storage metric, device, or service.

As your infrastructure grows, you can simply add more sensors to monitor additional storage resources or metrics. The modular sensor-based architecture is one of the main reasons PRTG has become a popular choice for organizations with diverse IT environments. It provides both broad infrastructure visibility and the flexibility to monitor storage at the level of detail your environment requires.

Feature-in-focus: Real-Time storage performance monitoring

Real-Time storage performance monitoring is PRTG’s ability to continuously monitor the health, performance, and availability of your storage infrastructure as data is generated. It collects live performance data from storage systems and monitors key metrics to give you an up-to-date view of how your storage environment is performing at any moment.

If storage latency suddenly increases, available disk space begins to run low, or a storage device becomes overloaded, PRTG immediately displays these changes through its dashboards and graphs and can trigger alerts based on predefined thresholds. This real-time visibility enables you to quickly identify performance bottlenecks and ensure that applications continue to access storage resources efficiently.

Why do we recommend it?

We recommend Paessler PRTG Storage Monitoring because of its unified multi-vendor storage coverage, full-stack data path correlation, and long-standing reputation in the IT monitoring industry.

During our evaluation, we found that PRTG provides unified monitoring for storage devices from multiple vendors. It natively integrates specialized, proprietary API and SNMP sensors for nearly every major enterprise storage provider. It features dedicated pre-configured sensors for NetApp ONTAP (tracking aggregates and volume health), Dell EMC (Unity and EqualLogic physical/logical disk status), HPE (Nimble and 3PAR metrics), Synology, and QNAP NAS arrays.

One capability that stood out during our evaluation is PRTG’s ability to follow the journey of data from where it is created to where it is stored. It captures telemetry across the entire data transit pipeline. It tracks physical disk metrics, virtual machine disk provisioning (via dedicated VMware and Hyper-V storage sensors), network fabric performance, and cloud repositories (via built-in AWS CloudWatch S3 and Azure Storage sensors).

PRTG has established itself as one of the most recognized and trusted infrastructure monitoring solutions in the industry. It has built a strong reputation for reliability, continuous innovation, and consistent performance. The product is backed by Paessler’s decades of experience in infrastructure monitoring.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend PRTG storage monitoring for sysadmins, network managers, and IT infrastructure teams in small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and mid-market enterprises who maintain a significant on-premises or hybrid data footprint.

If you’re buying PRTG for storage monitoring, you don’t need a separate storage monitoring edition. Storage monitoring is included in every PRTG Network Monitor license, so the best license depends on the size of your environment and the number of sensors you expect to use. Since PRTG uses a sensor-based licensing model, each storage metric (such as disk usage, latency, IOPS, or RAID status) consumes one or more sensors. The more storage devices and metrics you monitor, the more sensors you’ll need.

The PRTG 1000 license offers the best balance between cost and monitoring capacity for most organizations. It supports up to 1,000 sensors, which is typically enough to monitor around 100 devices. If you have a very small storage environment, PRTG 500 (up to 500 sensors) is usually sufficient. Larger enterprises can choose PRTG 2500, PRTG 5000, or PRTG 10000, depending on the size of your infrastructure. Organizations with very large or distributed environments can also request a custom PRTG Enterprise subscription.

You can buy these licenses directly from the official Paessler portal or through one of Paessler’s authorized regional partners and resellers. You can also start with a 30-day free trial to evaluate all features before committing to a subscription.

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4. LogicMonitor

Best for: Organizations that want to monitor storage as part of a unified hybrid infrastructure observability strategy.

Price: Essentials package starts at US$16 per hybrid unit

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and observability platform. LogicMonitor approaches storage monitoring as part of a broader hybrid infrastructure observability strategy. It monitors storage together with servers, virtualization platforms, cloud services, networks, databases, and applications.

The platform monitors virtually every part of your storage infrastructure, including SAN and NAS environments, storage arrays, RAID systems, Fibre Channel switches, storage pools, disks, volumes, controllers, cloud storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). It also works with many leading enterprise storage vendors, including Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM, Pure Storage, Hitachi, and Nutanix.

It tracks key storage metrics such as capacity utilization, IOPS, latency, throughput, disk and RAID health, controller status, storage pool and volume performance, and replication status. It also provides intelligent alerts, capacity forecasting, and performance trend analysis to help you plan for future storage needs.

If your goal is to monitor storage as part of a wider hybrid infrastructure that spans on-premises systems and cloud services, LogicMonitor is one of the strongest choices available. However, if your storage environment is the heart of your business and you need the deepest possible visibility, a dedicated storage monitoring tool like SolarWinds SRM offers more specialized capabilities.

LogicMonitor’s key features

• Storage Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitors SAN, NAS, storage arrays, RAID systems, Fibre Channel switches, storage pools, disks, volumes, controllers, cloud storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from a single platform.
• Multi-Vendor Storage Support: Supports leading storage vendors such as Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM, Pure Storage, Hitachi, Nutanix, and many others.
• Real-Time Storage Performance Monitoring: Continuously tracks key storage metrics, including capacity utilization, IOPS, throughput, latency, disk health, RAID health, controller status, and volume performance to help you identify issues before they impact users.
• Automatic Device Discovery: Automatically discovers new storage devices and resources, minimizing manual configuration and ensuring your monitoring remains up to date as your infrastructure grows.
• Capacity Planning and Trend Analysis: Tracks storage consumption and performance trends over time to help you forecast future storage requirements and plan capacity upgrades proactively.
• Intelligent Alerting: Generates proactive alerts based on performance thresholds and abnormal behavior, enabling faster detection and resolution of storage issues.
• Customizable Dashboards and Visualization: Provides centralized dashboards that display storage health, performance, capacity, and availability, giving you a unified view of your storage environment.
• Edwin AI-Powered Intelligence: Uses LogicMonitor’s Edwin AI to correlate monitoring data, prioritize incidents based on business impact, and recommend next steps.
• Unified Hybrid Infrastructure Observability: Monitors storage alongside servers, networks, cloud platforms, edge infrastructure, and applications.

Unique buying proposition

LogicMonitor’s official documentation consistently emphasizes that the platform brings together detection, context, intelligence, and governed action.

The software correlates information across storage, servers, networks, cloud infrastructure, applications, and user experience before presenting it to administrators. Its Edwin AI platform analyzes related infrastructure signals, ranks incidents based on business impact, and recommends the next course of action. It can even orchestrate remediation workflows through integrated ITSM and automation tools.

The emphasis is not on monitoring storage alone, but on providing the operational context needed to resolve problems more quickly. To be fair, most competing tools provide some of these capabilities too. However, LogicMonitor presents them as a tightly integrated system working together to move IT admins from simply monitoring infrastructure to making more informed decisions.

Feature-in-focus: Unified hybrid infrastructure observability for storage

LogicMonitor’s unified hybrid infrastructure observability for storage is its ability to monitor storage systems alongside the rest of your IT infrastructure (servers, networks, cloud services, applications, virtualization platforms, and edge devices).

Our research shows that this capability best reflects what LogicMonitor consistently emphasizes in its product documentation. It brings storage, infrastructure, cloud, applications, and AI-driven operations together in a single, connected monitoring platform.

Why do we recommend it?

We recommend LogicMonitor for use as a storage monitoring tool because you can deploy it to monitor not just your storage systems but also your servers, networks, cloud services, and applications from the same platform.

One thing I’ve learned from years of managing IT infrastructure is that most modern IT problems rarely stay confined to a single technology domain. They cut across many domains. What appears to be a storage problem may actually originate elsewhere in the infrastructure. So you’ll definitely need a unified monitoring and observability platform like LogicMonitor to help you understand how your storage, networks, servers, applications, and cloud services interact.

LogicMonitor began with infrastructure monitoring and has grown into an AI-driven observability platform, which is an added advantage. The company has, over the years, earned a strong reputation for helping businesses monitor and manage complex IT environments. It is backed by a well-established organization and an actively developed platform.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend LogicMonitor for medium to large organizations that want to monitor storage as part of a unified hybrid infrastructure observability strategy. It is valuable for enterprises, MSPs, and IT operations teams that manage multi-vendor environments.

If you’re looking to use it for storage monitoring, simply sign up for the 14-day free trial to evaluate the platform, then choose the subscription package that best fits your monitoring needs. Since storage monitoring is built into the platform, you don’t need to purchase a separate storage monitoring product. Just add your storage devices to the platform.

LogicMonitor is sold as a cloud-based subscription service and uses a hybrid unit-based licensing model. Pricing is based on the number of hybrid units you monitor. It offers three subscription packages: Essentials at US$16 per hybrid unit, which provides core observability features. The Advanced package is offered at US$27 per hybrid unit, and adds enterprise-grade observability for more complex hybrid environments.

The Signature + Edwin AI package starts at US$53 per hybrid unit, and it includes the platform’s most advanced AI-powered capabilities. All plans include storage monitoring, so the best package depends on the size of your environment and the level of AI and observability features you may require.

5. Datadog

Best for: Organizations that use cloud services, modern applications, or hybrid infrastructure.

Price: Infrastructure Pro starts at US$15 per host per month (billed annually)

Datadog monitors cloud infrastructure, applications, containers, Kubernetes, microservices, and DevOps environments. Storage monitoring is just one component of that ecosystem. Datadog has supported storage monitoring for many years as part of its infrastructure monitoring platform.

However, storage monitoring has always been one component of its broader observability strategy. Datadog’s approach to storage monitoring revolves around observability. It correlates storage metrics with data from servers, applications, networks, containers, and cloud services to quickly identify the true cause of performance issues.

Datadog supports physical and virtual disks, file systems, block storage, NAS, cloud storage, Kubernetes persistent volumes, container storage, virtual machine storage, and storage attached to cloud instances. It integrates with major cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as virtualization platforms and operating systems, to collect storage metrics.

Datadog tracks key metrics such as disk utilization, free and used space, disk I/O, latency, throughput, IOPS, file system usage, disk health, storage availability, and capacity growth. These metrics are displayed in customizable dashboards and can trigger alerts whenever performance or capacity thresholds are exceeded.

Nonetheless, remember that Datadog is optimized for cloud-native and hybrid environments. So if yours is a traditional enterprise storage infrastructure, Datadog may not give you the same in-depth view of your storage environment as dedicated storage monitoring tools.

Datadog’s key features

• Real-Time Storage Performance Monitoring: Continuously monitors storage performance by tracking key metrics and storage availability.
• Storage Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitors physical and virtual disks, file systems, block storage, network-attached storage (NAS), cloud storage, Kubernetes persistent volumes, container storage, and virtual machine storage.
• Cloud and Hybrid Storage Monitoring: Supports storage monitoring across on-premises infrastructure and major cloud platforms, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Infrastructure Correlation and Root Cause Analysis: Correlates storage metrics with data from servers, networks, applications, containers, and cloud services to identify the true source of performance problems.
• Intelligent Alerts and Notifications: Generates automated alerts based on customizable thresholds and anomaly detection, enabling IT teams to respond quickly to storage issues.
• Automatic Discovery and Integrations: Integrates with operating systems, cloud platforms, virtualization technologies, databases, and storage services to automatically collect and monitor storage metrics.
• Unified Observability Platform: Monitors storage alongside servers, networks, applications, containers, databases, and cloud services.
• AI-Assisted Observability: Uses AI-powered analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies and help IT teams troubleshoot storage-related issues more efficiently.

Unique buying proposition

From my assessment of Datadog’s platform and product documentation, its strongest differentiator is the fact that its storage monitoring is fully integrated into its full-stack observability platform. It monitors your storage together with your servers, applications, networks, databases, containers, and cloud services for a complete picture of how all of them work together.

Consider a company whose online banking platform suddenly becomes slow. A traditional storage monitoring tool may report that storage latency is high, leading the storage team to investigate the storage arrays. However, Datadog may reveal that the storage is actually performing as expected and that the slowdown was caused by a database generating excessive disk activity or a congested network link.

Your engineers will no longer have to piece together information from multiple monitoring tools because Datadog automatically connects related events across your entire IT environment.

Feature-in-focus: Infrastructure correlation and root cause analysis

This feature connects storage performance data with information from other parts of your IT environment, such as servers, applications, networks, containers, virtual machines, and cloud services.

Datadog analyzes how these components interact and helps you determine where a performance problem actually started. As a result, you gain a more complete understanding of your system’s health and spend less time investigating incidents.

Imagine your users complain that files are taking a long time to save. A traditional storage monitoring tool might tell you disk latency is high or storage utilization is 95%. But Datadog pinpoints the cause of the problem. It can determine whether the issue originates from a server, application, network, container, or cloud service.

Why do we recommend it?

From our assessment and evaluation of Datadog‘s platform, we recommend it because it helps you identify and resolve storage-related issues faster. It achieves this by bringing storage, infrastructure, applications, and cloud services into a single monitoring platform. As a result, your team can see how the entire IT environment is performing in one place, which makes it much easier to pinpoint the source of a problem and minimize business downtime.

Secondly, Datadog is a mature and well-supported platform with a proven track record, ongoing innovation, and the ability to meet future monitoring needs. Since its launch in 2010, the platform has evolved into one of the most widely adopted observability solutions that serves thousands of organizations worldwide across many industries. The platform is consistently recognized by industry analyst firms for its observability capabilities. It continues to invest heavily in new features, AI-driven analytics, and cloud technologies.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend Datadog for medium- to large-sized organizations whose storage environment is closely tied to cloud services, modern applications, containers, or hybrid infrastructure.

Datadog storage monitoring is included as part of its Infrastructure Monitoring product. After creating a Datadog account, you can start with a free 14-day trial and install the Datadog Agent on your servers or virtual machines. You can then connect your cloud accounts (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud) and supported storage platforms, and enable the relevant integrations to begin collecting storage metrics.

Once connected, Datadog automatically begins collecting and displaying storage performance and capacity metrics alongside the rest of your infrastructure. If you need additional capabilities such as application performance monitoring, log management, or network monitoring, these can be added as separate products within the same platform.

Datadog uses a modular, usage-based subscription model. For storage monitoring, the product you need is Infrastructure Monitoring. It is available in two editions: Infrastructure Pro and Infrastructure Enterprise. Infrastructure Pro starts at US$15 per host per month (billed annually) or US$18 per host per month (month-to-month). Infrastructure Enterprise starts at US$23 per host per month (billed annually) or US$27 per host per month (month-to-month).

6. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)

Best for: Businesses that rely on high-end storage infrastructure to support business-critical applications

Price: Available via custom quote

If you look at the direction of the industry and the products we’ve discussed so far, you’ll notice that most (if not all) are general-purpose monitoring platforms or have evolved into that over time. The evolution of these products clearly illustrates this industry trend:

• ManageEngine OpManager: Started with network monitoring, then expanded into full infrastructure monitoring.
• Site24x7: Began with website monitoring, then expanded into infrastructure, cloud, network, and application monitoring.
• PRTG Network Monitor: Started with network monitoring, then broadened into comprehensive infrastructure monitoring.
• LogicMonitor: Began as an infrastructure monitoring platform and has evolved into an AI-driven hybrid observability platform.
• Datadog: Started with cloud infrastructure monitoring, then evolved into a full-stack observability platform.

So why have nearly all of these vendors followed the same path? One possible explanation is that modern IT environments have become increasingly interconnected, so most companies now prefer a single platform to monitor their entire infrastructure. Both the software vendors and organizations save time, effort, and costs by developing and deploying one scalable all-in-one monitoring tool.

The exception here is SolarWinds SRM. It was developed specifically for storage monitoring. It remains focused on storage because its target market requires capabilities that are difficult to replicate in a general-purpose monitoring platform. SolarWinds SRM is a dedicated enterprise storage monitoring solution built specifically to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot enterprise storage environments. It provides extensive visibility into storage arrays, SAN fabrics, NAS systems, Fibre Channel switches, storage pools, LUNs, RAID groups, controllers, disks, and volumes.

Based on our review of SolarWinds’ official documentation, SRM was developed to address the limitations of traditional infrastructure monitoring tools. If you observe closely, you’d realize that many organizations have outgrown the basic storage monitoring features found in traditional infrastructure monitoring tools. Modern storage environments have become more diverse and heterogeneous, and handle increasing volumes of data. IT teams need extensive visibility into how those storage systems are performing, and SRM was created to meet that need.

If storage is one component of your infrastructure, an all-in-one monitoring platform may be sufficient. But if storage is a mission-critical part of your business and you need granular visibility into its performance and health, SRM offers a level of depth that general-purpose monitoring tools typically cannot match.

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor’s key features

• Storage Visibility: Provides a centralized view of the health, performance, and capacity of storage systems across multiple vendors from a single dashboard.
• Automated Storage Capacity Planning: Continuously tracks storage consumption and analyzes capacity trends.
• Deep Storage Performance Monitoring: Monitors the performance of server volumes, NAS volumes, LUNs, storage pools, and virtual machine datastores to help identify storage bottlenecks and performance issues.
• Dynamic Storage Relationship Mapping: Traces the relationships between storage components, such as VM datastores, LUNs, storage pools, and storage arrays.
• Storage Health Monitoring: Provides detailed insights into the overall health and availability of storage devices.
• Resource Reporting and Analytics: Includes prebuilt and customizable web-based reports that provide real-time and historical insights into storage performance, utilization, and capacity.
• SAN Performance Monitoring: Continuously monitors Storage Area Networks (SANs) to improve performance, identify bottlenecks, and maintain optimal storage operations.
• NAS Performance Monitoring: Tracks the health, utilization, and performance of Network Attached Storage (NAS) arrays to ensure reliable data access and availability.
• Integration with SolarWinds Observability: Integrates seamlessly with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted for easier correlation of storage performance with servers, networks, applications, and other infrastructure components.

Unique buying proposition

SolarWinds didn’t build SRM simply to monitor storage devices. It was developed to provide deep operational insight into enterprise storage architectures. According to its documentation, SRM monitors not only storage arrays, but also LUNs, storage pools, VM datastores, SANs, NAS systems, server volumes, and the relationships between these components.

What impressed us most during our evaluation of SRM was not simply its ability to monitor storage, but how it understands enterprise storage environments. SRM analyzes the relationships between LUNs, storage pools, VM datastores, SANs, NAS systems, and server volumes to help you pinpoint bottlenecks. This, in a nutshell, is its unique buying proposition.

Feature-in-focus: Automated storage capacity planning

Many storage monitoring tools can tell you what is happening now, such as how much storage is being used or whether a disk is running out of space. SolarWinds SRM goes a step further. It tells you what will happen next.

The software continuously monitors storage consumption, analyzes usage trends, and forecasts future storage requirements so you can plan capacity upgrades before shortages impact applications or users.

Why do we recommend it?

We recommend SolarWinds SRM because it is one of the few tools built specifically for enterprise storage monitoring. During our evaluation, we found that SRM provides a much deeper level of insight needed to detect bottlenecks early, troubleshoot problems faster, and plan storage growth with confidence.

Another reason we recommend SRM is its ability to fit into a broader IT monitoring strategy. SRM integrates seamlessly with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted to allow you to monitor storage alongside servers, networks, and applications from a unified platform. If your organization already uses other SolarWinds products, SRM becomes even more valuable because it extends your visibility across the entire IT infrastructure, although this may result in additional licensing costs.

Lastly, SolarWinds has earned a strong reputation in the IT infrastructure monitoring industry over many years. Its products are widely used by enterprise IT teams around the world and have consistently evolved to meet the demands of modern IT environments. That established track record makes it a dependable choice for organizations that need a dedicated, enterprise-oriented storage monitoring solution.

Who is it recommended for?

We recommend SRM for medium to large organizations that rely on enterprise storage infrastructure to support business-critical applications. You’ll find it really valuable if you are a storage administrator, infrastructure engineer, or IT operations team member responsible for managing SAN, NAS, virtualized, and multi-vendor storage environments.

If you’re looking to purchase SRM to meet your storage monitoring needs, you do not need to buy SolarWinds Observability unless you also want broader infrastructure observability. SRM is available as a standalone product, although SolarWinds also offers it as an add-on to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted for organizations that want unified monitoring across storage, servers, networks, and applications.

You can start by downloading the fully functional 30-day free trial to evaluate the software in your environment. If it meets your needs, request a quote from SolarWinds or one of its authorized resellers, then choose the license tier based on the size of your storage environment.

SRM uses a physical disk-based licensing model. Your license is determined by the total number of physical hard drives (HDDs and SSDs) contained within all the SAN and NAS storage systems that SRM monitors. The capacity of each disk does not matter; only the number of physical drives is counted. Disk drives installed in regular servers are not included in the license calculation.

Our methodology for choosing storage monitoring tools

We followed a structured process to identify storage monitoring platforms. Our evaluation revolved around the following factors:

1. Storage Monitoring Capabilities: We evaluated the depth and breadth of each platform’s storage performance, health, capacity, availability, and utilization monitoring capabilities.
2. Storage Technology and Vendor Support: We assessed support for SAN, NAS, cloud storage, virtualized storage, and compatibility with leading storage vendors.
3. Ease of Deployment and Management: We evaluated how easy each platform is to install, configure, manage, and maintain.
4. Scalability: We assessed each platform’s ability to support growing storage environments and increasingly complex IT infrastructures.
5. Alerting, Reporting, and Visualization: We evaluated the quality of dashboards, reporting, analytics, and real-time alerting capabilities.
6. Integration and Ecosystem Support: We assessed compatibility with cloud platforms, virtualization technologies, operating systems, applications, and third-party tools.
7. Licensing Model and Pricing: We compared licensing options, subscription models, pricing transparency, and overall cost considerations.
8. Vendor Reputation and Product Maturity: We considered each vendor’s industry reputation, product stability, customer adoption, ongoing innovation, and long-term support.
9. Overall Value: We assessed the overall value each platform delivers based on its features, usability, scalability, support, and cost.

Broader B2B software selection methodology

We evaluate B2B software using a consistent, objective framework that focuses on how well a product solves meaningful business problems at a justified cost. This includes assessing overall performance, scalability, stability, and user experience quality. We examine real-world feedback from practitioners to understand how the software behaves in non-controlled demos.

We also review vendor transparency, roadmap clarity, support responsiveness, and the pace at which meaningful improvements are released. We follow this approach to ensure each of our recommendations is grounded in practical value, long-term viability, and operational impact, not in marketing claims.

Check out our detailed B2B software methodology page to learn more.

Why trust us?

Our work is produced by a team of IT and business software professionals with extensive hands-on experience evaluating, deploying, and managing enterprise technology. We analyze software independently, using evidence-based methods and industry best practices to ensure our assessments remain unbiased and technically sound.

Our goal is to provide you with clear, reliable insights that help reduce risk, shorten evaluation cycles, and support confident decision-making when selecting complex business technology.