PRTG Network Monitor and Kentik are two products competing in the network monitoring category. PRTG appears to have the upper hand in terms of ease of use and affordability, while Kentik is preferred for its advanced analytics and real-time visibility.
Features: PRTG offers ease-of-setup, multi-platform functionality, and out-of-the-box sensors, making it ideal for organizations seeking simplicity and broad network coverage. On the other hand, Kentik shines with its real-time visibility, traffic analytics, and flow data capabilities, which support advanced traffic engineering and network performance optimization.
Room for Improvement: PRTG could improve its template management, map design flexibility, and detailed SLA reporting. It would also benefit from refinements in multi-user interface and distributed monitoring for remote networks. Conversely, Kentik could enhance its usability for API calls and broaden integration capabilities for more actionable insights from its analytics, despite its strengths in exhaustive data visualization options.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PRTG is deployable on-premises or through hybrid cloud setups, which allows for rapid deployment and usability. However, its customer service could be improved with faster response times and more than email support. Kentik, predominantly on-premises or private cloud, aligns its service with European business hours, which can be a drawback in time-sensitive situations.
Pricing and ROI: PRTG offers an affordable entry point with free versions and scalable pricing tiers, providing good ROI with reduced monitoring manpower and downtime prevention. Kentik, perceived as more expensive, is suitable for high-volume traffic management, benefiting from its subscription-model flexibility. Both provide promising ROI through efficiency gains but cater to different budget scales.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
It provides accurate data for utilization, allowing us to monitor and optimize our investments in WAN connection capacity.
After introducing PRTG Network Monitor, we have saved time, and it's easy for everybody to monitor everything.
The implementation reduced our employee resources from 20-25 to 5-6 employees.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
They resolve our queries 24/7.
The setup process is well-documented, making it easy to deploy.
Tutorials are available so I can manage any issue with PRTG Network Monitor easily.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
On a scale of one to ten, scalability is rated as 9.5.
PRTG Network Monitor has the ability to scale and add new devices.
You can install them in each network, even if they are not connected, and it works.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
We haven't needed vendor support for the last three years, which demonstrates the product's stability.
PRTG Network Monitor is stable in my experience, and I have not encountered issues with crashes or downtime.
PRTG Network Monitor is very stable and requires low maintenance.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
The initial auto-discovery added too many unnecessary sensors, so auto-discovery should only take the necessary sensors into consideration.
They need to improve application performance monitoring, error tracing mechanisms, and log management.
PRTG Network Monitor should provide syslog monitoring since it is not available at this time.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The licensing part is a recurring license for every year, which is very affordable, making PRTG Network Monitor budget-friendly.
Pricing is by the number of devices, not by sensor.
The prices are very high for PRTG Network Monitor.
The most important feature is cybersecurity.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
PRTG Network Monitor already provided me with 100 free sensors, which is enough for my network monitoring.
PRTG Network Monitor has a good dashboard that shows each and every piece of information, so we can easily find out what is happening with the systems.
These reports help me in my day-to-day work, and I rely on them because they provide proof during escalation, with exact downtime logs and related information.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| PRTG Network Monitor | 3.3% |
| Kentik | 1.2% |
| Other | 95.5% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 59 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 19 |
| Large Enterprise | 47 |
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
PRTG Network Monitor runs on a Windows machine within your network, collecting various statistics from the machines, software, and devices which you designate. PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports. This will let you plan for network expansion, see what applications are using most of your connection, and make sure that no one is hogging the entire network just to torrent videos.
To monitor a large IT environment, it's important to be able to scale PRTG up. Paessler PRTG Enterprise Monitor includes all the proven capabilities of PRTG Network Monitor, which are enhanced by exclusive ITOps Board for a service-oriented, central overview of multiple PRTG servers.
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