Top 10 Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM) Tools for 2024
Data breach attacks have led to billions of sensitive data records being leaked, stressing the importance of continuous cyber security monitoring tools.
Updated March 5, 2024.
Data breach attacks are as explosive as it gets. In 2020, Microsoft suffered a massive leak involving more than 250 million customer support data. While 250 million certainly sounds like a lot, Keepnet Labs makes the record for over 5 billion records exposed. Companies that experience a breach end up underperforming by more than 15% on average over three years.
Enough bad news for the day? Thankfully, there is a solution for every problem, and implementing appropriate security tools will go a long way in protecting your systems. This article will guide you through the ten best continuous security monitoring tools for 2023.
Our Top Picks for 10 Best CSM Tools for 2024
- Best for monitoring servers: Nagios
- Best overall CSM tool: Jit
- Best patch management software: Syxsense
- Best for managing big data volumes: Splunk
- Best for debugging third-party libraries: Lightrun
- Best for remediating security misconfigurations: Spectral
- Best for overall website security: Cloudflare
- Best real-time website spoofing protection: MemcyCo
- Best for securely deploying IoT devices: FirstPoint
- Best for industrial IoT remote monitoring and management: Galooli
What Is Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM)?
Continuous security monitoring (CSM) is a security practice that continuously assesses an organization's security posture and identifies security risks in real time.
CSM is a proactive approach to security that can help organizations identify and respond to security threats before they cause damage.
» Learn about the best open-source product security tools for developers
How Do Continuous Security Monitoring Tools Work?
Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM) tools enable developers to detect and respond to security threats in real-time.
CSM tools collect data from various sources, including network traffic, system event logs, and user activity. These tools then analyze the data for signs of suspicious or abnormal activity and generate an alert to take appropriate action.
To be effective, CSM tools must be constantly updated with the latest security intelligence and integrated with other security tools, such as intrusion detection systems (IDS) and firewalls.
1
Nagios
The open-source standard in monitoring
Threat detection and analysis
Focus on system and network monitoring but lacks advanced threat detection features
Data ingestion and integration
Ingests basic system and network metrics with limited third-party integrations
Reporting and visualization
Basic reporting and visualization for system and network metrics
Deployment and scalability
Can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and scales moderately
Brief overview
Nagios is a monitoring system that watches mission-crucial infrastructure and has multiple APIs allowing easy integration with in-house and third-party applications. Being open source, there are also thousands of community-driven add-ons and extensions for monitoring and native alerts.
Features
- Monitor your entire IT infrastructure quickly
- Quickly and easily view, analyze, and archive logs from any source in one central location
- See where your bandwidth is dipping or spiking
- Centralized visual operational status that enables faster problem resolution over your entire network
- Alerts can be delivered to technical staff via email or SMS
- Open-source software
- Integration with in-house and third-party applications is easy with multiple APIs
Customer review
"Nagios does standard monitoring of servers and network devices very well. If you have an environment with many basic protocols to monitor, Nagios will work well out of the box for you. It also runs very reliably. Once it is set up, I have not had many problems with the service being available."
- Chris Saenz, Lead System Engineer
Pros and cons
Extendable architecture
Offers Service-Level Agreement (SLA) reports
Comes with a configuration wizard
Web UI can be confusing to navigate
Can produce frequent false positive alerts
No GUI-based config means everything needs to be done through the command line
2
Jit
The only open DevSecOps orchestration platform
Threat detection and analysis
Integrates with open-source security tools for improved threat detection
Data ingestion and integration
Integrates with chosen open-source tools and requires manual configuration
Reporting and visualization
Monitor detailed security scores per team and track the progress of your security plan
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based platform, easy to deploy but limited scalability without advanced configuration
Brief overview
Jit is a DevSecOps orchestration platform that simplifies integrations with open-source security tools. With Jit, developers can easily integrate security tools and controls into their CI/CD pipelines, and protect their application stacks from code to infrastructure, as well as the entire supply chain. By leveraging best-of-breed OSS security tools, such as Gitleaks and OWASP ZAP, it is possible to apply popular security plans as code like custom AppSec programs, compliance plans - such as SOC2, and even OWASP Top 10, through simple security controls. Jit also helps DevOps teams build an effective security plan and integrate continuous security into their workflows with minimum effort.
Features
- Fast and automated scanning within GitHub
- Only scans newly introduced code so developers can focus on vulnerabilities relevant to their change
- Measure security performance metrics like MTTR and vulnerabilities in production
- Easily plug any tool into Jit’s extensible orchestration framework
- Jit’s Context Engine determines whether a vulnerability is actually exploitable in production, preventing alert fatigue
Customer review
“I love the notion of Jit providing as-code security plans, which are minimal and viable. The fact that Jit also automates the selection of relevant security tools and unifies the experience around them is super valuable.”
Pros and cons
Dev-friendly: built for developers with a focus on dev experience across platforms
Fix-first focused, making it easy to find the code to remediate and fix issues fast
Orchestrates and unifies all tools, so developers don’t need to learn each tool
Limited scalability
3
Syxsense
Security vulnerability scanning tool
Threat detection and analysis
Endpoint security solution with basic threat detection for malware and intrusions
Data ingestion and integration
Focuses on endpoint data ingestion with limited external integrations
Reporting and visualization
Provides reporting on endpoint security metrics with basic visualization options
Deployment and scalability
Agent-based deployment on endpoints and scales well for large networks
Brief overview
Syxsense is a security vulnerability scanning tool that allows you to see and remediate endpoints. It comes with a drag-and-drop interface, the ability to see your security issues in real-time, and quarantine devices from further access.
Features
- Automated endpoint and vulnerability platform
- Real-time visibility across your environment
- Built-in compliance and security reporting for PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO, SOX, and CIS benchmarks
- Automate foundational processes like patch scanning, patch deployment, vulnerability scanning, and vulnerability remediation
Customer review
"Syxsense solves the issue of keeping our machines up to date without having to touch each machine manually. It is a great support tool. Also, I have had issues where a user is missing something critical on their machine. Building a package is rather easy as well. They also have support options available to assist.”
- Derek E.
Pros and cons
Ability to remote into a system, create updates and patches
Intuitive interface
Remote access can often freeze and locks up the system from reconnecting
Admin portal can sometimes be slow
4
Splunk
Unified security and observability platform
Threat detection and analysis
SIEM platform with powerful log analysis and anomaly detection capabilities
Data ingestion and integration
Supports a wide range of data sources and integrations but requires extensive configuration
Reporting and visualization
Powerful and customizable dashboards and reports but requires technical expertise for effective use
Deployment and scalability
On-premises or cloud deployments, highly scalable but requires skilled IT personnel
Brief overview
Splunk is a "unified security and observability platform." You can use Splunk to watch your endpoints, capture log files, and present them in a meaningful and analytical-based output.
Features
- Identify key risks and detect threats with artificial intelligence
- Automate actions to address alerts when they’re detected to save time and resources
- Streamline and standardize workflows for faster detection and response times
- Full visibility into how changes will impact your digital environment
- Expert guidance, success plans and access to support
Customer review
"So simple for Splunk to capture all the data that runs on an enterprise's applications. Splunk acts as the repository to take this data and then allows us to slice and dice the data as we wish to generate reports, improve analysis, get a better handle on our business, improve productivity, improve business/market intelligence, react more quickly to trends, take decisions more proactively, etc."
- Azhar C., IT Security & Compliance Analyst
Pros and cons
Ability to make your security logs more mentally digestible
Ability to create automated alerts and reports
Not very easy to use with a steep learning curve
Requires a good understanding of Linux and systems administration skills
Can be resource-heavy for the host machine
5
Lightrun
IDE-native observability and debugging platform
Threat detection and analysis
Focused on cloud infrastructure security to detect threats like unauthorized access and configuration changes
Data ingestion and integration
Ingests cloud infrastructure data and integrates with common cloud platforms
Reporting and visualization
Offers clear visualizations of cloud security threats and activity
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based platform that scales effectively for large cloud environments
Brief overview
Lightrun is an IDE-native observability and debugging platform that allows developers to add logs and metrics to create traces in a live environment. Tools like Lightrun can be handy for error management and bug tracing, as there's no need for redeployments or restarts when code is added through Lightrun.
Features
- Capture context in real-time without stopping execution
- Get visibility across replicas, regions, or entire clouds
- Understand codeflow and code behavior in production by highlighting the code path your users take
- No code changes, redeployments, or restarts needed
- Dynamically instrument logs, traces, and metrics for real-time insights into the behavior of your applications and run-time
Customer review
"Great tool for faster incident resolution and real-time debugging without needing to add new code"
- Shir M, Software Engineering Intern at Google
Pros and cons
Requires live production application access
Cut down on logging costs because you can generate these on the live application during the debugging process
More post-production assistance rather than a preventative tool
6
Spectral
Automatically identify security blind spots
Threat detection and analysis
Offers behavioral analysis and detection of advanced threats in network traffic
Data ingestion and integration
Ingests cloud infrastructure data and integrates with common cloud platforms
Reporting and visualization
Provides interactive visualizations of network traffic anomalies and threats
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based platform that scales effectively for large cloud environments
Brief overview
SpectralOps is a scanning tool that can be integrated within your CI/CD system to automatically identify security blind spots and sensitive assets like secret keys, unsecured API endpoints, credentials, and misconfigurations in real-time. It scans your entire codebase and sends instant notifications once an issue is detected, enabling your team to easily and quickly resolve it.
Features
- Automate the processes of secret protection at build time
- Monitor and detect API keys, tokens, credentials, security misconfiguration, and other threats in real-time
- Continuously uncover and monitor public blind spots, supply chain gaps, and proprietary code assets across multiple data sources
- Seamlessly integrate your own playbooks, build your own detectors, and implement mitigation policies throughout your software development lifecycle
- Advanced AI-backed technology with over 2000 detectors to uncover data breaches before they happen
- Get real-time slack alerts and workflow with JIRA tickets
Customer review
"One of the reasons we picked Spectral over the other products is Spectral has low false-positive results, which give us a high confidence factor and save us precious development time."
- Nimrod Peretz, VP R&D, Wobi
Pros and cons
Quickly identify, monitor, and classify your sensitive assets from potential secrets exposure
Specializes in secrets discovery in codebases
Minimal configuration required to get started
Language-agnostic and supports more than 500 stacks
Specializes in code vulnerabilities
7
Cloudflare
Cloud infrastructure & network traffic monitoring
Threat detection and analysis
Provides website security features like DDoS protection and WAF, limited threat detection beyond web attacks
Data ingestion and integration
Primarily ingests website traffic and security events but has limited external integrations
Reporting and visualization
Offers basic reporting and visualizations for website security events
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based web security platform, highly scalable for global website traffic
Brief overview
Cloudflare is a cloud infrastructure platform with a network traffic monitoring system called flow-based monitoring (now called Magic Transits). It deals with keeping your cloud systems up by diverting DDoS-detected network traffic away from your main cloud infrastructure setups.
Features
- Improve security and resilience while reducing your attack surface, vendor count, and tool sprawl
- Regain visibility and control of IT and security across on-prem, public cloud, SaaS, and the Internet
- Connect and secure your employees, contractors, devices, networks, apps, and data everywhere they live
- Give your digital products and services top-notch security, reliability, and performance
Customer review
"Easy to use, good documentation, reasonably priced, and they have good support"
- Andrii Prager, CTO at QROK GmbH
Pros and cons
Stable and good with DDoS protection
Easy to scale
It can become costly to maintain
No clear live tracking is available
8
MemcyCo
Proof of Source Authenticity (PoSA) tool
Threat detection and analysis
Primarily focused on security posture assessment and vulnerability management with limited real-time threat detection
Data ingestion and integration
Ingests vulnerability scan data and security assessments, limited real-time data integrations
Reporting and visualization
Provides reports on vulnerability findings and security posture assessments
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based platform that scales based on chosen plan and usage
Brief overview
MemcyCo is a Proof of Source Authenticity (PoSA) tool that enables companies to protect their digital assets from impostor attacks such as brand identity theft and phishing scams.
MemcyCo surveils all communication touchpoints between the company and its customers, partners, or employees. If an attack is detected, this tool automatically notifies the company before the attack reaches the end user. MemcyCo also offers an authentication watermark that can be used on companies’ websites or emails, which helps build customer trust.
Features
- Impostor site alert that appears when users access cloned or spoofed versions of your website
- Show a forge-proof authenticity watermark to every website visitor
- Real-time brand impersonation monitoring, alerting, and protection
- Gain unprecedented visibility into spoofing attempts that go undetected by domain registration and web scanners
IoT Monitoring
At the end of the cloud are the Internet of Things devices. These devices need to be monitored for power and data efficiency. Here are two of the best IoT monitoring platforms available.
Pros and cons
Real-time tampering detection
Secure and customizable watermark that can’t be forged
Can be easily installed with one line of code
Email and SMS authenticity verifications are additional tools, paid separately
9
FirstPoint
Targeted cellular IoT monitoring platform
Threat detection and analysis
SIEM platform with threat intelligence integration and automated incident response workflows
Data ingestion and integration
Supports various data sources and offers pre-built integrations with security tools
Reporting and visualization
Customizable dashboards and reports for security incidents and events
Deployment and scalability
On-premises or cloud deployments and scales well for large security operations
Brief overview
FirstPoint is a targeted cellular IoT monitoring platform that protects entire IoT networks and the data transmitted between IoT-connected devices. You can use FirstPoint to prevent new and emerging threats such as identity compromises, eavesdropping, unauthorized location tracking, malicious SMS, and data leakage. This tool is customizable to any use case and scalable to fit business needs.
Features
- Distributed EPC/5GC with user management, intuitive connectivity management, and billing
- Supports both mobile core network level security and specific use case protection mechanisms
- Subscribers can roam between public and private networks will full support for CBRS neutral host network (NHN) and eSIM profile scenarios
- Multiple deployment options with full support for multiple virtual environments and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC)
- Enables enterprises to create custom implementations over the core network via simple API functions
Customer review
"FirstPoint's unique and innovative solution provides an added layer of protection at the cellular signaling network level, a true industry first,"
- Eric Williams, Founder, CEO & Innovator, iJura
Pros and cons
Covers 2G to 5G range
Available for both on-premise and in-cloud options
Centralized online management platform
Limited to cellular IoT
10
Galooli
IoT monitoring and management platform
Threat detection and analysis
Cloud security platform with threat detection for cloud misconfigurations and unauthorized activities
Data ingestion and integration
Ingests cloud activity data and integrates with major cloud platforms
Reporting and visualization
Provides visualizations of cloud security threats and activity trends
Deployment and scalability
Cloud-based platform that scales effectively for large cloud environments
Brief overview
The power bill can quickly grow for businesses that manage their on-premise infrastructure if everything remains on all the time. Galooli is an IoT monitoring and management platform that ensures efficient energy management and operational savings.
Features
- Carbon emissions KPI tracking helps achieve environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals
- Full visibility over your remote assets and their performance using real-time monitoring and management capabilities
- Available on web and mobile devices
- Immediate access to any relevant alerts or events
Customer review
"Its easy access and user-friendly interface made me like the software; even a novice could make use of the software if you give them a simple explanation on how to use the software."
- Arinze.
Pros and cons
Supports various industries including data centers, telecommunications, mobility, utilities, and renewables
Easy to use and understand interfaces
Limited to enterprises
Focused on physical IoT assets and not cloud-based infrastructures
Types of Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is the process of monitoring and assessing security controls on an ongoing basis and is an integral part of an organization’s security program.
There are three main types of continuous monitoring: infrastructure, application, and network.
1. Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring is the process of monitoring the physical components of a system, such as servers, storage, and networking equipment.
The main benefit of infrastructure monitoring tools is that they can help identify problems with hardware or other physical components of the system. For example, a server constantly running at a high temperature may indicate a hardware issue.
2. Application Monitoring
Application monitoring is the process of monitoring the software components of a system, such as the application code, the application server, and the database.
Application monitoring can help identify problems with the application code, such as slow performance, memory leaks, and even malicious code.
3. Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is the process of monitoring a system's network traffic, including the router, switches, and other networking equipment.
Network monitoring can help identify problems with the network, such as high latency or packet loss.
Continuous Security Monitoring Benefits
Organizations are under constant attack from sophisticated cybercriminals. Active monitoring and cyber security tools are required to defend your organization against malicious acts.
Here are the significant benefits of CSM:
- Helps identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities early before they can be exploited
- Reduces the impact of a security breach or attack by providing timely detection and response
- Improves an organization’s security posture by providing visibility into potential risks and vulnerabilities
- Can save time and resources by automating the monitoring process
- Can improve compliance with security-related regulations and standards
Whatever You Choose, You Still Need a Security Plan
CSM tools are essential to respond to threats in real time. However, to ensure maximum protection across your entire CI/CD system, you need to integrate with various tools and have a solid security plan in place. This can easily get overwhelming for your DevOps team.
That’s why Jit offers a Minimum Viable Security plan that makes it simpler to protect all stages of your software development. We also work as an orchestration layer to facilitate integrations with all the relevant security tools you need for each stage. Get started for free and continuously protect your product with minimum hassle.
