ISPbox

Best Free Tools for ISP

By nielogiczny-1 | Published on Nov 25, 2025

Best Free Tools for ISPs in 2025

If you run an ISP or WISP, you already know two things:

  1. margins are not huge,
  2. downtime kills trust fast.

Good tools help a lot, but many ISP platforms are expensive or bloated. The good news is that you can build a very strong stack around free and open source tools, plus a modern ISP panel with a free tier.

In this article I will show you three tools that work really well together:

  1. LibreNMS – network monitoring and alerting
  2. Smokeping – latency and packet loss monitoring
  3. ISPBox – client management, billing and support

All three are perfect for small and medium ISPs that want to grow without spending thousands on licenses.

Why every ISP needs a free tool stack

As an ISP you need three big things:

  • To see when devices go down or start to behave badly
  • To catch latency and packet loss problems before customers explode on WhatsApp
  • To manage clients, invoices, packages and support tickets in one place

LibreNMS covers devices and services.
Smokeping is your latency radar.
ISPBox is where you manage the business side: clients, contracts, RADIUS, invoices and support.

Let us go through each one.

1. LibreNMS – your free network monitoring NOC

LibreNMS is a full featured, open source network monitoring system. It uses SNMP and other protocols to discover and monitor routers, switches, servers and many other devices. It supports many vendors, so it works great with MikroTik, Cisco, Juniper and most common ISP gear.

Key features that matter for ISPs

  • Auto discovery: LibreNMS can automatically discover your network using CDP, LLDP, OSPF, BGP, SNMP and ARP, so you do not have to add every device by hand.
  • Alerting: flexible alert rules that can notify you by email, Slack and other channels when something is wrong.
  • Custom dashboards: build NOC style views for your support team with maps, graphs and widgets.
  • Traffic graphs and billing: store bandwidth usage and even generate bandwidth based bills using 95th percentile or quota models.
  • Distributed polling: scale out to multiple pollers in different locations as your network grows.
  • API: a full API so you can integrate LibreNMS with other systems.

How an ISP can use LibreNMS day to day

  • Monitor all core routers, aggregation switches and tower switches
  • Watch CMTS, OLT, wireless APs and backbone links
  • Build a dashboard with top talkers, CPU and memory usage, interface errors
  • Get alerts when a tower switch goes down or a link flaps
  • Track bandwidth per customer VLAN or per port if your setup allows it

For many small and medium ISPs, LibreNMS can replace expensive commercial NMS systems.

2. Smokeping – your latency and packet loss radar

LibreNMS will tell you when something is down. Smokeping tells you when the network feels laggy even if everything is technically up.

Smokeping is an open source latency monitoring tool. It measures round trip time and packet loss to many targets and stores the data in RRD files. The graphs show not only average latency, but also jitter and loss, which is critical for VoIP and gaming users.

What Smokeping can do for your ISP

  • Measure latency and jitter: see if your upstreams or backhauls are clean or if they spike in the evenings.
  • Detect packet loss: identify bad wireless links, overloaded upstreams or problems inside customer networks.
  • Advanced alarms: set alerts on patterns like slowly growing latency or small but constant packet loss.
  • Distributed probes: run master and slave setups to measure from multiple locations at the same time.
  • Clear graphs: easy to read charts that show latency distribution over time, not just a single line.

Practical ISP use cases for Smokeping

  • Monitor latency to each upstream transit provider
  • Monitor latency between main POPs, towers and core sites
  • Monitor latency to public services like Google, Netflix, gaming CDNs
  • Prove to customers that the problem is on their WiFi or router, not your backbone

Many ISPs run Smokeping side by side with LibreNMS. LibreNMS is “is it up and how much traffic”, Smokeping is “how does it feel for the user”.

3. ISPBox – client management, billing and support in one place

LibreNMS and Smokeping are great for the technical side, but they do not manage clients, packages, invoices and tickets. Here is where ISPBox comes in.

ISPBox is an ISP management platform focused on small and medium providers. It gives you one panel for:

  • Client database and CRM: keep all customer data, notes and contact history in one place.
  • Internet packages: define speed profiles, FUP rules and pricing in a simple way.
  • Billing and invoices: generate invoices automatically, handle recurring payments and export for accounting.
  • RADIUS integration: authenticate users over PPPoE, Hotspot or DHCP with Mikrotik and other NAS devices.
  • Support tickets: manage customer issues, priorities and statuses so nothing gets lost in Messenger or WhatsApp.
  • Multi tenant ready: run multiple brands or parks from the same platform if you need it.

ISPBox also has a free plan for smaller ISPs, so you can start without risk and upgrade only when you grow out of the free tier.

Why ISPBox is a good fit next to LibreNMS and Smokeping

  • LibreNMS tells you a tower is overloaded
  • Smokeping shows that latency to that area is getting worse in the evening
  • ISPBox shows exactly which clients are on that tower, what packages they have and if they pay on time

This combination lets you make decisions based on both technical and business data.

How to combine these 3 tools into one ISP stack

Here is a simple way to structure things:

Monitoring layer

  • Use LibreNMS to monitor all devices: routers, switches, APs, servers, CMTS, OLTs
  • Push alerts to email, Discord or Slack so your on call tech sees problems quickly
  • Use traffic graphs and interface errors to plan upgrades before links hit 90 percent usage

Latency layer

  • Use Smokeping to monitor latency from your core to:
    • Upstreams and peering points
    • Each main tower or POP
    • Important customers or VIP sites
  • Set alarms when latency rises above your normal baseline or when packet loss appears

Business layer

  • Use ISPBox as the single source of truth for clients, services and invoices
  • Connect your RADIUS to ISPBox so service changes are automatic
  • Use ticket history to understand which areas or devices cause the most pain for customers

In daily work you might have LibreNMS and Smokeping on a big TV in the office, and ISPBox open in a browser for the support team.

Best practices for small and medium ISPs

To get the maximum value out of these free tools:

  • Start small but standard: deploy everything in a clean way, document hostnames, IP ranges and poller locations.
  • Use templates: create standard alert rules and dashboards, do not reinvent them for every device.
  • Tag everything: use groups, locations or tags in LibreNMS and ISPBox so you can quickly filter all clients on tower A.
  • Review graphs weekly: once per week, spend 30 minutes looking for slow trends, not only for hard outages.
  • Connect tech and support: teach your support team how to open graphs and tickets, so they can answer “is it you or us” in seconds.

Next steps

If you want a strong and cheap tool stack for your ISP:

  1. Install LibreNMS on a small Linux VM or server and start discovering your network.
  2. Deploy Smokeping and add your core targets and upstreams.
  3. Create a free account at ISPBox.net, import a few test clients and set up your packages.

With these three tools you cover:

  • Network monitoring
  • Latency and packet loss
  • Clients, billing and support

All of that with free or open source software and without heavy vendor lock in. This is a strong base for any modern ISP or WISP that wants to grow fast and stay in control of costs.

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