We are primarily using this product for alerting. We receive notifications for events like the interface going up or down and remote access, as well as information such as the interface volume.
We're using the basics of it to monitor our switches and routers and primarily just the networking equipment for up-down status.
This solution makes it easy to group devices. It is easy when it comes to dependencies of devices, so if your router goes down, the three or four switches behind it will automatically be paused so that you don't get multiple alerts.
The maneuverability within it is fairly intuitive, especially once you get used to it.
I would like to see them take their graphing tools and convert them into a collector so that we can point telemetry to them. This is a general comment about all of the network monitoring equipment and I think that it would make the product more valuable in the long run. As it is now, you have to point telemetry at Kibana or another open-source solution and then graph out of that. I don't see the point of that, given that I've got SolarWinds and the choice of other network monitoring software. However, none of them allow you to use it as a collector for telemetry, so the stream is part of the switch.
I posed this question to PRTG and they were unresponsive, so it seems like not enough customers are complaining about it or would be potentially using it. But that's where I think in the long term, it would be of benefit. Licensing becomes an issue, and I understand that, but I think that if they could allow a collector of telemetry and re-displaying that graphically, it would be the next best thing.
If you don't have something that is doing the SNMP manipulation then it is a bit clunky, although they have good documentation on it. You can add as many SNMP MIBs as you want to, and it's just a matter of processing them into their format.
We have been using the PRTG Network Monitor for between three and four years.
This is a fairly stable product and we don't have to do a lot of maintenance. They do come out with patches and we're applying them. We do have to occasionally reboot it, although I'm thinking it's not nearly as buggy as SolarWinds. In this version of PRTG, I don't have any issues that I'm aware of.
Scalability is not bad and you can add extra to it. We don't have a scaling issue right now but from what I can tell, it appears that it can scale well.
We have used SolarWinds products and currently use them for backup. We have problems with stability and we fix them by rebooting the device. PRTG seems to be more stable, in general.
One of my senior engineers performed the initial setup. I am doing the maintenance on it along with my engineer. Applying patches if required is not something that we've had an issue with.
It's an annual license that is based on the number of endpoints that we're tracking and using.
We have created several maps for this product, and there is at least one map that people specifically use. It is put up on our wall for the helpdesk, and it has all of the switches and routers in a pie so that you can see what's down and what's up. It is a nice red, green, and blue color coordination. This is displayed along with the utilization of firewalls and our egress points, and some other critical points in the network for the service desk to look at. If they get several calls from a site and they can look up at the map and see that there is a bunch of red, possibly recognizing a network issue, then it is helpful.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
