18 Best IoT Testing Tools For QA Teams In 2024

Datadog is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring tool that assists IT administrators maintain the overall health of their networks, extending beyond cloud service models to incorporate serverless ecosystems. 

Datadog is feature-rich to supports any service stack or application layer, whether its monitoring the health of the CI pipeline or maintaining regulatory compliance transparency through audits across pipelines. It facilitates cloud migration and digital transformation with tools that enable collaboration among business, operations, and development teams. 

Datadog provides security, network, database, and synthetic monitoring in addition to log management and optimizing application performance. With real user monitoring, Datadog allows teams to monitor user journeys, especially frontend performance in one place. This provides an integrated view of running services and IT programs across a network, including a comprehensive view of serverless applications. 

Datadog provides an abundance of features for robust application management. encompasses the ability to trace requests across distributed systems, and track and understand user behavior. You can schedule automated report generation and real-time alerts to fortify your system against digital threats. 

When it comes to dashboards, Datadog offers administrators with two choices. It allows teams to quickly assemble a customized monitoring dashboard to accommodate any specialized need. Alternatively, they can choose the prefabricated dashboards that come with Datadog. 

Datadog supports as many as 350 integrations with its variety of API services covering key network protocols such as SSH (Secure Shell), SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). 

In addition to a 14-day free trial, Datadog offers three pricing tiers: Free, Pro ($15 per host/month), and Enterprise ($23 per host/month).

Appknox is an automated testing suite that provides on-demand mobile application security to enable businesses to detect and remediate vulnerabilities. AppKnox applies DevSecOps throughout the CI/CD lifecycle by scanning mobile apps during their development phase, during deployment and delivery, and even after publishing in app stores. 

In so doing, it reduces the friction of adoption, complexity, manpower costs, and delivery timelines. Moreover, AppKnox offers a flexible engagement model that provides businesses with several deployment models and approaches to their security requirements. Its strategy is to use a smart system approach combined with expert human resources. From manual application testing, vulnerability assessment tools, issue tracking, and remediation calls. 

With its vast API capabilities, AppKnox makes it easy to integrate into the application development cycle, providing a worthy API testing partner, whether it is for securing apps by STAST, DAST, or the server-side of things. This integration typically involves logic, data, and other relevant objects with other software applications. 

AppKnox has three tiers, namely Essential, Professional, and Enterprise. Essential provides a one-time vulnerability assessment and targets organizations just getting started with mobile application security. On the other hand, Professional is ideal for businesses who seek unlimited vulnerability assessments and multiple updates on the same app while Enterprise is for banks and enterprises with mission-critical security needs. 

AppKnox prices are available on quote. 

Mobot is a SaaS product that's designed to help QA teams with IoT testing by giving the responsibility over to mechanical robots. Once you upload and customize your test to Mobot's self-serve test plan tool, a robot will perform the test and generate a report that your team can use to improve your product.

Cross-platform testing enables organizations to automate tests for applications across different operating systems, devices, and browsers. This ensures consistent testing coverage and helps identify platform-specific issues and compatibility problems. Mobot is particularly adept at testing mobile applications on both iOS and Android devices. It offers comprehensive support for different device models, operating system versions, and screen sizes, ensuring thorough testing across the mobile ecosystem.

Mobot stands out for its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, making it exceptionally adept at automating complex and dynamic test scenarios. Unlike many traditional QA testing tools that rely on static scripts, Mobot leverages machine learning algorithms to adapt and evolve its test scripts based on the application's behavior. This unique feature allows Mobot to perform exploratory testing by learning from previous test runs and identifying potential areas of concern or instability.

Testers can also automate user interactions such as clicking buttons, entering text, and verifying expected outputs using Mobot's automation solutions. This helps ensure that the application's UI is responsive and functions as intended. Mobot's test automation solutions serve many purposes, including cross-platform testing and UI and functional testing.

Mobot provides detailed reports and analysis of test results across all tested platforms. Testers can easily identify discrepancies, bugs, and performance issues specific to particular platforms, making it easier to prioritize and address cross-platform concerns.

Mobot integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, Trello, Bugzilla, TestRail, Zephyr, and Microsoft Azure.

Mobot pricing starts at $1,500/month/action. Further pricing information is available upon request. A 30-day free trial is also available.

As the Internet of Things has grown in popularity, the BevyWise IoT simulator is increasingly sought to test IoT applications and the messaging communication protocol (MQTT) that it relies on. 

BevyWise allows engineers to test IoT applications with or without physical devices. They can either create templates effectively that act as placeholders for physical devices or simulate thousands of unique virtual devices in a matter of minutes. 

BevyWise IoT simulator has four pricing tiers, which are differentiated by features supported and the number of clients permitted. However, they are standard pricing packages, which means you only pay once but use it in perpetuity.

Stream allows 1,000 clients and costs $599. River allows 5,000 clients and costs $1,799. Sea allows 10,000 clients and costs $2,999. Ocean allows unlimited clients but you need to contact sales for a price quotation.

Wireshark is an open-source network tracker and troubleshooting tool for analyzing traffic. It is both a packet capture tool and a network protocol analyzer. It is ideal for discovering different kinds of network bugs, including capturing TCAP messages generated during calls. 

Its features include dividing network calls into layers, thereby facilitating better analysis and troubleshooting. When Wireshark is in operation, the users of the network don’t notice any perceptible difference in service. This is because Wireshark doesn’t intercept the network packets; they are only copied, so the stream of network traffic reaches its intended destination. 

Its GUI makes it possible to display various types of packets and filter different types of traffic. It is a network sniffer that can be used on a multi-platform basis, covering Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, and NetBSD, among others. In addition, it also operates on LAN and wireless communications. 

Among the distinguishing features provided for the user include the ability to offer multiple levels of details, including customizable, color-coded identification of packet types. Wireshark provides a data visualization viewing panel with deep inspection and decryption support of several communication protocols. 

Wireshark allows you to generate and output reports in plain text, XML, CSV, and other formats.

Wireshark is free and open source. 

Sensu is a SaaS, cloud-based service that allows you to future-proof your cloud infrastructure with performance monitoring at scale. In addition, Sensu enables you to build event pipelines to automate workflows tailored to the needs of different processes in the business.

These monitoring solutions aim to provide enterprises with in-depth observability across protocols and systems, ranging from bare metal to Kubernetes orchestrations. Hence, it allows the automation of registration and deregistration of connected devices, servers, containers apps, and services. This visibility is primarily achieved through Sensu’s ability to eliminate data siloes. 

Sensu is important in an age of dynamic infrastructures and provides automatic diagnoses and self-healing features to address this reality. Sensu also offers metrics, tracing, and logging features to address the gaps in observability due to our current dynamic infrastructures. 

To make monitoring easier, Sensu has declarative configuration files to facilitate the codification of monitoring workflows. Moreover, these files can be treated as code repositories, for example, they can be versioned, shared, and viewed by team members. 

Sensu embraces monitoring as code, which equally makes it extensible as an integration partner. This turn-key integration works with many cloud platforms such as Kubernetes, GCP, Azure, AWS, Docker, Red Hat OpenShift, and OpenStack, among others. It also allows for alerts and notifications through integration with incident management tools such as ServiceNow, Slack, Jira, and VictorOps. 

For lack of a better word, Sensu has two pricing tiers: Sensu Go and Sensu Plus.

Sensu Go is free for up to 100 nodes. However, Sensu allows you to evaluate the product beyond 100 nodes using its free 14-day trial. Sensu Go Pro is suited for both SMBs and enterprise organizations and is priced at $3 per node/month. Sensu Go Enterprise is designed for large teams and costs $5 per node/month. 

Like Sensu Go, Sensu Plus is also free. However, Sensu Plus offers more features such as DPM, metric and event retention. Unlike Sensu Go Pro, Sensu Plus Pro is priced higher at $5 per node/month. In the same vein, Sensu Plus Enterprise costs more than its Go counterpart at $8 per node/month.

CloudTest enables organizations to prepare their environments for anticipated or predicted spikes in application loads. CloudTest helps you to gauge whether your system can adequately respond to unforeseen or sudden spikes in user activity. 

It provides real-time application load and performance testing to help ensure your infrastructure has a dispersed workload. CloudTest also gives real-time feedback that makes it possible to quickly identify problems with better accuracy. In so doing, organizations are able to plan for events such as campaign promotions and holiday sales by subsequently bulletproofing their online infrastructure. 

CloudTest is user-friendly, without any coding required to set variables, parameters, or validations. In addition, it also allows you to reuse and combine tests. Apart from performance testing, CloudTest can be integrated into the software development lifecycle, by allowing QA testers to automate CI/CD operation checks, and operations staff to evaluate performance at scale while empowering developers to test API services. 

CloudTest integrates with CI/CD pipelines, along with offering the choice of either a fully managed service or a self-service solution. 

Pricing for CloudTest is available upon request. 

Shodan is like a search engine for internet-connected devices. It enables users, most especially security experts discover information and make more intelligent decisions using a variety of filters. Shodan helps to safeguard IoT endpoints and internet-facing devices like servers, routers, thermostats, maritime satellites, and even baby monitors. 

Moreover, due to its public-facing nature, it readily finds worthy use cases in industries as far-fetched and dispersed as transportation, energy, power, water treatment facilities, and much more. In that regard, Shodan also helps identify systems and sensitive devices that shouldn’t be publicly accessible for security purposes such as traffic lights, security cameras, industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, 

As an IoT search engine, Shodan can be used to keep track of activities on these and users’ devices by launching scans and receiving real-time alert notifications, especially when something goes awry. Hence, it allows users to gain complete visibility with connected devices and subsequently troubleshoot vulnerabilities. 

This includes identifying phishing websites, data leaks on the cloud, and compromised databases. 

Shodan can be used to limit IoT devices to local-only connections because they don’t typically need to be online or share information with other devices. Shodan provides users with convenience by offering both a command-line interface and a website app for monitoring. 

It has a developer-friendly API which allows it to integrate with several communication mediums to provide notification options such as Gitter, PagerDuty, Slack, Discord, MS Teams, Telegram, and so on. 

Shodan has three options tiers, namely Freelancer, Small Business, and Corporate priced at $69 per month, $359 per month, and $1099 per month respectively. 

If you need to fully manage and secure a fleet or group of IoT devices, then AWS IoT Device Defender is the tool. It enables organizations to audit security policies and automate security assessments to ensure IoT configurations don’t deviate from best practices.

In addition to continuously monitoring IoT devices, AWS IoT Device Defender’s other key capabilities include authenticating devices, detecting anomalies, encrypting device data, and auditing device cloud-side configurations. 

It employs machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies in device behavior, especially when they exceed manually-defined static thresholds. AWS IoT Device Defender sends alerts when it discovers security risks. This can occur under conditions such as when a disconnect or gap exists in IoT configurations, erroneous sharing of identity certificates across several devices or even having an improper device with a revoked certificate attempting to connect to the AWS IoT core. 

Its security management duties encompass collecting and reporting security metrics. This, in turn, automatically triggers necessary remediation or mitigation operations such as rebooting or deploying the appropriate security patches. 

AWS IoT Device Defender integrates with various Amazon services such as  AWS IoT, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Connected Vehicle Solution, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and much more. 

In terms of pricing, there are no minimum fees or mandatory services - you only pay what you use with AWS IoT Device Defender. Therefore, the AWS Pricing Calculator is provided to give users an indication of the estimate they’ll be charged based on the architecture of your customized services. 

However, several options include Audit pricing, Rules Detect pricing, and ML Detect pricing. In this vein, the AWS Free Tier provides limits for new customers on Audit (free for all devices in the fleet for the first month) and Rules Detect (1 million metric data points for the first month). 

Alternatively, you can request a quote from the sales department. 

Tcpdump is a command-utility tool that is provided by libpcab, a C/C++ library of procedures. It provides users with the ability to intercept and display traffic, especially packets from TCP/IP protocol, and troubleshoot traffic transmitted over a network. 

It is essentially a packet sniffing tool and is ideal for examining traffic, especially on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like operating systems. However, there is a version adapted for Windows called WinDump and it relies on WinPcap for packet capture. But unlike Tcpdump, WinPcap isn’t open source but is proprietary and owned by Riverbed Technology. 

Tcpdump provides several features that include the capacity to list all interfaces, capture IP address packets, capture packets from specific interfaces, save and read packets from a file, and so on. Tcpdump gives users several options with flags, parameters, and regular expressions to change the format, order of execution, and even add a few programming concepts to the packet selection. 

When these are specified, Tcpdump follows the instruction to capture the packets that satisfy the laid down test expressions and requirements. 

Tcpdump is open source and free.