PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We primarily use the solution in order to monitor the network performance and stability.

The pricing of the solution is pretty good. We don't find it too unreasonable. It's pretty compatible if you look at it in comparison to the competition.

The solution offers good integration capabilities.

The initial setup was easy. We didn't have any issues with the process and everything rolled out smoothly.

Their penetration within the market could be much better. If their pricing was lower, even though it's reasonable now, it might help them achieve this.

The solution needs a better graphical grid. A good example of what I mean is SolarWinds, which has an excellent graphical grid. It would help with organizations that have a bit more complexity.

I've been working with the solution for the last ten years. It's been a decade. I've worked with the product for a long time.

The stability seems to be quite reliable. It's a good product. I can't comment on dealing with any bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I've never personally had the chance to contact technical support. Having never reached out directly, it would be hard to discuss their knowledgeability or responsiveness.

We found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward. It wasn't too complex. We didn't have any trouble setting everything up.

We handled the implementation ourselves, in-house. We didn't need to hire any outside consultants or integrators.

The pricing of the solution is fair and in line with the rest of the market. It's not too high.

While I didn't properly evaluate SolarWinds, I have seen other people using it and I found that it had a very nice graphical grid and GUI.

We only use the product ourselves. We're end-users and customers, not resellers or consultants.

For smaller networks, I would recommend this solution. That said, if the network is complex, I would recommend a company evaluates another product instead. Something like SolarWinds may be a better option in cases of complexity. It's not the scalability, rather graphically, the GUI you get in terms of displays and things of that nature look much better in SolarWinds. I should preface this recommendation by saying that I have not used it. I've seen people using it. I feel that looks much better and would be better suited based on what I have seen.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If it had a better graphical grid similar to SolarWinds, I would rate it higher.

The solution is for network monitoring.

Overall it is a very good tool to use. 

The bandwidth monitoring is a very attractive feature, it can tell you the bandwidth utilization while it is attempting to connect to the host for feedback.

It has the capability to discover a lot of information over the networks automatically.

Network monitoring is not the strongest area of the solution which should be improved. It is not the best tool of the application but if someone has to start from the beginning and reach a moderate level of abilities for monitoring, then PRTG still serves that purpose. For experts, it is not the application monitoring tool they would choose. This tool is more suited for beginners and intermediate users.

The solution has to evolve as an end-to-end monitoring solution. It has to do better at understanding the application at the deepest level.

The performance of the monitoring is outdated and when they have upgraded the tools in the past, it slows down the performance.

Auto Discover features could improve by allowing people the choice to manipulate the discovery to design and customize it to create a technical map of the services dependent on each of them.

They should also add service monitoring. They currently have a Windows service, but they do not have monitoring as a separate service. If I would like to specifically monitor the service within Windows, I would have no choice but to use theirs. 

I have been using the solution for approximately ten years.

It is a stable solution. I did not see any challenges. However, the performance is not that good. When asked about stability, I will split it into two parts. When I go into the devices and I click on the devices, I should see all the devices immediately, I do not, which is a performance issue. When I click on one of the devices in the list of All Devices section, it should show me the graph and the monitoring statistics site. This is where it has failed many times, it does not show it. We complained about this to PRTG many times. I currently find the solution to be 80% stable.

The scalability should come deep within the roots of the solution. The root of PRTG is having a lot of sensors inside because they work on monitoring sensors. The more sensors you have, the more you can scale. The good thing about the solution is that you can make your own sensors. This means it is scalable.

I did not have a good experience with customer service. They were not able to give answers in a timely manner. They were able to give some less complex answers but when the questions become difficult, they find it very difficult to manage a solution. For example, what do bandwidth monitoring and bandwidth sensor mean? I think they should be able to explain this to me better, they could not explain it well. Their bandwidth sensors do not really work as a bandwidth sensor.

I think they might have some missing knowledge or they have unqualified employees sitting down and reading the documents from their screen to the customers, like myself. I find that technical support could have been much better, they have been a company for many years. They need to continue to support their customers in a much better way and should hire experts as other organizations do. When contacting support it is handled by the very first level of agents, then it is escalation up for an answer. I did not like this about the support, it takes time. I find myself left trying to solve the problem myself.

The technical support requires a lot of improvements, they offer a lot of information to be downloaded and used by the customer. I think it has to be supported much better to allow customers the ability to easily deploy it and use it effectively.

I did not have any challenges attempting to install the solution. It was quite straightforward, you do not need any training to install it. The experience was good.

The deployment is the longest part of the setup. I would say the installation did not take much time but the complete utilization of the software took three or four hours. I had to configure it properly, discover the sensor, support the sensor, utilize it to the best possible way, make a group, and put in the site. All of these processes take time. If somebody has experience in PRTG, I think it can be done in half day.

I have evaluated SolarWinds and it is one of the easiest for beginners to start working with network monitoring.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, if they are a beginner, there are other products out there that might be more appropriate, like SolarWinds.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor a seven out of ten.

We use it for some internet providers and educational institutes.

It is very flexible, and we can monitor many aspects of IT as well as ERP and CRM services. It has a very powerful interface and APIs for customization. 

Its price can be better. Its price is a problem for us because it is in dollars, and there is a high conversion rate. 

In terms of new features, it can have BGP monitoring. It should also have a dashboard and maps editor.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

It is installed on a Windows Server, and its stability is very nice.

Its scalability is good. For on-premises deployments, the scalability depends on the hardware. For cloud deployments, the scalability depends on the number of servers.

Around 50% of our clients are small organizations and around 20% of our clients are big organizations.

Their technical support is pretty good. As a reseller, we get fairly good support from them, and we also sell support services for our clients.

The initial setup is very easy. An average implementation takes one to two hours.

It is expensive.

They have a roadmap in which they have described all the features for the upcoming releases. This roadmap is available on their portal.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a ten out of ten.

Within our organization, only the network department uses this solution — there are eight of us.

It gives me a live view of the traffic on the WAN. It produces reports on errors and faulty devices. It also produces a lot of logs on what is afoot. I can produce many reports using it.

It needs to have more monitoring on end-user devices. We can monitor a set of network devices, but not end-users' devices.

It would be nice if it gave us alerts via Gmail or SMS message.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

PRTG Network Monitor is both scalable and stable.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is very straightforward — it's just a simple cover server.

We are currently evaluating many other security solutions.

I would recommend this solution because it's great for monitoring network traffic and producing reports.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

We have offices around Australia, we're a company organization with a couple of hundred people where we monitor four or five offices and their networks. We use the solution on a daily basis. We're a customer of PRTG and I'm president of our company. 

We like the solution's report writing and the way that it compiles the system's information from around the network and brings it all back into the central site and the interface. 

The solution could be improved by increasing the way that it polls the different engines which we feel is quite slow. It also doesn't integrate very well with service desks or anything else. Pre-packaged integrations with other product sets would be something we'd like to see in any future release.

I've been using this solution for three and a half years. 

The solution is stable except for when you want to do upgrades and then they try to move everyone over to the cloud versions. 

The solution is scalable, it's just a matter of including another piece of software and hooking it up through the network, through the Cisco routers, and away you go. 

I previously used Zabbix and Nagios which are problematic performance wise. They're not modern and neither are the interfaces. We prefer PRTG. 

The initial setup of the solution was easy. Our guys did some of it in-house and then we got an external party to help us, a local specialist. Implementation probably took about three months to get it to the point where we were happy with it.

Use of the product requires planning. Start with your ideas on paper first before you start doing your deployment and then ask yourself 'what if' questions - what if this or that happens. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Our primary use case with PRTG is measuring and monitoring the system. We have a few servers running in redundancy. There are two monitoring ones. One for the maintenance staff with more details and the other one is for general control and assessing when there is a user error or 401. We use it on the business logic level. With redundancy, the FRC is just to monitor whether there is a complete down or only one system goes down.

We see everything being monitored on the screen. When we do mapping it's easier for us to monitor whether it's the server's fault, the feature's fault, or it's the router, or some other device, or some other legacy system. It all starts with the monitoring.

The feature I like is that it can easily do a lot of mapping. 

I can easily access the maintenance map and the four control maps. By looking at it I can roughly know why the system is behaving as it is, and I can click to the second or third layer to identify the fault. I also like the 365 days statistical graph. These are very helpful for me to analyze the flow and to record the trends.

Because our system doesn't connect to the internet, it wants us to put in the license and then the activation should occur. Sometimes we do the activation when we are passed date. When we try to activate the license past date, it's not as easy as we thought it should be. In other words, they could improve the process of updating the license.

If I do it correctly before the activation expires, it should be okay. But if I try after the due date has passed then you can't get the correct security patch.

I would prefer if PRTG could work in redundancy mode with an external database rather than how it is now with the database inside PRTG, where I can access it only through the report. If you have an external database you can do another trace on the data with the redundancy while the monitoring system is still going on.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for almost two years.

So far there are no issues with the stability. The only setback is that I don't know why there's only one PRTG running the system. If one fails then redundancy is not there.

PRTG is quite easy to use as long you have the hang of it. The only problem are the legacy systems that don't have direct connection.

The issues to pay attention to in terms of scalability are the sensors. The sensors help you isolate your problem. Let's say my only problem now is field monitoring. I might also want to have central monitoring but I couldn't do it. If you have a field monitoring system you may also want to have a central monitor as well. I haven't tried to do that yet on PRTG because I need higher levels to monitor my three or four PRTG systems. In other words, the product is not so easy to scale.

Right now it is just me and my colleague working on this product. We use it on a daily basis. We have groups for the maintenance center and the reporting center. Both are monitoring and mapping. I configured this for them.

The support is fantastic. Because of our time difference I get my message replied to by the next morning. It's quite fast.

My client is asking me to look into Icinga. Icinga is still new to me and I'm not yet sure about it. I think it's a Nagios software. I did use Nagios before, but I didn't configure it, it was part of the system delivery.

With Nagios, I can't see the graph, or the trends, or the mapping of an individual site. I'm not really sure about Nagios.

When I joined the company PRTG was already setup. They subsequently added more servers, so I got to learn it through my colleagues.

In the beginning, I downloaded PRTG for free and did my own experiments. I would advise others to do that, too. Download it and try it out. When you do that you'll see where the limitations are.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate PRTG Network Monitor about an eight. I still think there's room for improvement, especially when it comes to updating the event configuration.

We have deployed this solution on numerous platforms.

The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors. For example, we have an HP Server, but we do not need an HP Server monitor, or a separate storage monitoring system that is specific to HP. We are able to use this solution for a centralized, multiple-technology safe.

The dashboarding definitely needs improvement.

It would be nice if they included support for analytics, such as functionality to help understand trends in the data. The data might include network outages, network utilization, and storage utilization. Also, if there is any kind of predictive ability coming out then it would add a lot of value.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

Our environment contains two and a half thousand servers and ten thousand desktops.

We have six people who perform the support functions. It is used on a daily basis, and we are planning on expanding usage to include access to our help desk. There are automated tickets generated when PRTG picks up faults on the network.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We used WhatsUp Gold prior to this solution. There were multiple problems with varying versions and support channels, and there is no standardization or central visibility with all of the instances.

What we wanted was a tool that is scalable and could be used in a modular approach, so we chose PRTG and moved away from WhatsUp Gold.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward.

The deployment took approximately three months. There are a vast number of files and a level of complexity in our environment, but that is not the fault of the vendor. Unfortunately, given that we do not have a small environment, the deployment took time.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and we were very happy with their service.

We have not been measuring ROI from a financial perspective. Rather, we are looking at measuring efficiency. This is determined by looking at how quickly we discover faults and how quickly they are remedied. We have just started with this.

We have an unlimited perpetual license, so we just pay support costs and it can scale throughout the organization. 

For anybody who is interested in implementing this solution, I would say that planning is essential. It can be very complex and can generate a lot of data. You can become overwhelmed and then the solution becomes irrelevant because of the number of reports and alerts that it can generate. Planning is critical.

This solution is geared towards practical alerting and monitoring. It is not really meant to give advice or any sort of analytics.

Overall, this is a very good platform and provides value to the organization. However, in terms of the dashboards, there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to manage our systems internally. At some point, we will be offering it as a managed service.

It has helped us make sure that most of our systems stay up. It has also helped us optimize our systems. For a lot of our systems, our software is a service, so they've worked absolutely fine on their own. Where we can't offer software as a service, like our website, it has helped us optimize these applications and keep the uptime on them, helping ensure they stay working.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us look back at prior instances, then we can use that information to come up with a solution or make improvements.

It is pretty simple to use, which is always a good thing. It's been very reliable in updating us if any issues crop up.

The sensors and remote probes seem to work absolutely fine. They don't seem to take up, if any, resources on the machines, which they keep an eye on quite nicely.

The solution's feature set is very good. It seems to be extremely reliable and all its features work. There is less for us to do, because it does what we need it to do.

While the desktop app is good, they could slightly improve it. We would like it to be a single pane of glass. At the moment, you can only see certain portions of information. You have to scroll through to make it more granular. We want them to develop the desktop app to be more user-friendly.

I would like a screen where you can get all the information without have to granually go look for it. If they can make it, so you can sort your own dashboard and customize it based on your needs that would be great.

I have never seen this solution go down once. Compared to everything else out there, which you see drop once in a while, this solution hasn't done that since we've taken it up.

It seems very easy to scale up. When you configure it, that is all you need to do. You only need to set it up once.

The solution will grow with our business. If we do need to add anything to the solution, it has not been a problem. Do it once, and that's it. It is done.

We have never really had to use them because the solution has been working that well. 

The company is only about a year old. This was the first solution that we used.

The initial setup is a tiny bit complex, but you expect these things to be a bit complex. However, it wasn't anything too taxing nor did it take a long time to set up.

It took a couple days from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure from monitoring.

We are the reseller, so we did the deployment.

It has saved us time. At previous companies that I have worked for, they have used similar solutions, which were not as good as this one. They still had to put a bit of work into working out why and what happened. This solution seems to give us an answer straightaway.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The reliability of the solution means we are doing less work trying to figure out issues and optimize systems, as it is already supplying us with the information that we need. Therefore, it has saved us a lot of time and effort.

Give the soluton serious consideration. If you are not too sure about it, try the free version. Then, if you like it, you can go to the paid version and roll it out.

My technical director chose this solution out of all the products that he had a look at, as it stood out straightaway.

The modes for the desktop app, like the API, update via email, providing us the information that we need with handy options, which we use mostly when monitoring. There are easily integratable into our call logging system, which automatically logs a call when there is an issue.