Best Network Discovery Tools for Linux

FirstWave’s NMIS is a complete network management system that provides fault, performance, and configuration management, performance graphs, and threshold alerts. Business rules allow for highly granular notification policies with many types of notification methods. NMIS consolidates multiple tools into one system, ready for Network Engineers to use. Scalable, flexible, open, and simple to implement and maintain, NMIS is the Network Management System that underpins the operations of over one hundred thousand organizations worldwide – making it one of the most widely used open-source Network Management Systems in the world today. FirstWave enables partners, including some of the world’s largest telcos and managed service providers (MSPs), to protect their customers from cyber-attacks, while rapidly growing cybersecurity services revenues at scale. FirstWave provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for network discovery, management, and cybersecurity for its partners globally.

ManageEngine OpManager is an effective network discovery solution that automatically identifies and maps all devices within a network. It provides comprehensive visibility into the network infrastructure, including routers, switches, servers, and other components, enabling IT teams to understand their network topology. With features like automatic device classification, real-time updates, and detailed reporting, OpManager simplifies the management of complex networks. This powerful tool helps organizations maintain accurate inventories, optimize resource allocation, and enhance overall network performance by providing valuable insights into device relationships and connectivity.

Unimus is an on-prem Network Automation and Configuration Management (NCM) solution built for rapid deployment and simplicity. Its powerful Network Discovery scans your network to detect all devices, collecting hostnames, serial numbers, vendor, OS info, and open SSH/Telnet ports. Discovered devices are instantly available for backups, audits, config pushes, and CLI access. Scans can be scheduled, and the engine supports IP exclusions for focused discovery. This gives IT teams full network visibility with minimal effort. With support for 400+ device types from 150+ vendors, Unimus is a vendor-neutral solution offering automation, change management, and config auditing. It reduces manual errors, strengthens security, and speeds up operations — no coding needed.

Since 2004, NetBrain has transformed network operations with its no-code automation platform, helping teams systematically shift left by turning complex processes into streamlined workflows. By unifying AI and automation, NetBrain delivers actionable hybrid network-wide observability, automates troubleshooting, and enables safe change management to boost efficiency, reduce MTTR, and mitigate risk, enabling IT organizations to proactively drive innovation. Get network-wide and contextualized observability across your multi-vendor, multi-cloud network Visualize and document the entire hybrid network using dynamic network maps and end-to-end paths Auto-discover and document hybrid network

OpUtils is IP address and switch port management software that is geared towards helping engineers efficiently monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot IT resources. OpUtils complements existing management tools by providing trouble shooting and real-time monitoring capabilities. It helps network engineers manage their switches and IP address space with ease. With a comprehensive set of over 20 tools, this switch port management tool helps with network monitoring tasks like detecting a rogue device intrusion, keeping an eye on bandwidth usage, monitoring availability of critical devices, backing up Cisco configuration files, and more. Enable advanced IP scanning of IPv4 and IPv6 subnets in your network to identify the available and used IP addresses. Scan all the switches in your network, map switch ports, run port scans and view details such as physical location, user, and more. Identify rogue device intrusions and block access to these devices.

Atera, the first and only Agentic AI platform for IT management, offers IT teams and MSPs a digital workforce of AI agents to preemptively and autonomously manage their entire IT operations. Its all-in-one platform combines RMM, helpdesk, ticketing, and automation to reduce downtime, improve SLAs, and free IT teams to focus on strategic work over mundane tasks. At the core of Atera’s platform are two powerful AI agents built to enhance every layer of IT operations. AI Copilot helps technicians troubleshoot devices, run diagnostics, and generate actionable solutions in real time. IT Autopilot delivers 24/7/365, autonomously resolving Tier-1 issues and reducing IT workload by up to 40%. It acts like a personal AI technician for every employee, freeing your team to focus on what really matters. Trusted by 13K+ customers in over 120 countries, Atera scales with your needs while maintaining the highest security and compliance standards.

​Open-AudIT is a powerful network discovery and inventory software that intelligently scans an organization’s network and stores the configurations of the discovered devices. This provides immediate access to software licensing, configuration changes, non-authorized devices, capacity utilization, and hardware warranty status reports. Open-AudIT can collect significant amounts of data from large and varying networks that are cataloged and can easily be configured into meaningful reports. It enables users to easily create network discovery profiles for their organization and then run a discovery with a single click or even on an automated schedule. It audits the organization’s network daily without impacting the user experience and intelligently stores the configuration of every discovered component. Open-AudIT tracks and reports on IT asset configuration changes, software licensing, shadow IT, and hardware warranty status.

Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program. It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols, send them on the wire, capture them, match requests and replies, and much more. It can easily handle most classical tasks like scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit tests, attacks, or network discovery (it can replace hping, 85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, tshark, p0f, etc.). It also performs very well at a lot of other specific tasks that most other tools can’t handle, like sending invalid frames, injecting your own 802.11 frames, combining technics (VLAN hopping+ARP cache poisoning, VOIP decoding on WEP encrypted channel), etc. Scapy runs natively on Linux, Windows, OSX, and on most Unixes with libpcap. The same code base now runs natively on both Python 2 and Python 3. Scapy development uses the Git version control system. Scapy reference repository is hosted on GitHub.

Provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party addons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems. Provides a central view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. Powerful dashboards provide at-a-glance access to powerful monitoring information and third-party data. Views provide users with quick access to the information they find most useful. Automated, integrated trending and capacity planning graphs allow organizations to plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems catch them by surprise. Alerts are sent to IT staff, business stakeholders, and end-users via email or mobile text messages, providing them with outage details so they can start resolving issues immediately.