PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

Our clients use this solution to see if the network is up and running, for pings and services such as emails and disk space.

I use it for monitoring since I am the system admin to keep things up. Overall, the information it gave didn't offer any suggestions to change anything.

The up-to-date graphs and the history are very good.

They keep adding services, such as MS SQL monitoring, and email monitoring to keep the different parts of the e-mails going.

The implementation is easy, initially.

Also, the servicing of Linux and Windows Operating Systems are useful.

The free version only gives us 100 free sensors to use. It would be nice if there was double that.

The additional services such as MS SQL and email monitoring took a bit of work, so I would like to see it easier to do.

I have been acquainted with PRTG Network Monitor for approximately seven years.

I have used it for a customer in the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version. I keep them updated.

It's a stable product and I have not experienced any issues. 

Our clients are not that large. It's single-server monitoring for some systems. We didn't have to scale it.

Our clients are small businesses, with under 100 seats.

We have not needed to contact technical support, but the forums are pretty good.

We did not use technical support because it was pretty straightforward. I kept my monitoring pretty simplistic, and I didn't try to do anything extra that would cause more angst and set things up.

We haven't used a monitoring system before.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to set up and implement.

To have the additional features costs a lot. It's too much. If it was half the price, we would purchase more.

All monitoring systems are close to the same pricing scheme.

For others who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend it. Please use it, it's good. It's very friendly, easy to use, and it's web-based, which means you don't have to be logged into a server to get something done.

Also, the updates are easy to do, just double click and away it went. On occasion, updates had to be done from the server, but that wasn't very often.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of ten.

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.

We use the solution to recollect data from past equipment.

The solution's most valuable aspect is its ability to make reports. We appreciate that in the tool. It could be to relay corrupt data information, and we tell ourselves that it's gone, however, tools for that are expensive in terms of the labor. To perform your analyses with this solution is easier. We can recover past data and make analysis effectively.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The option to perform cross-correlated information about the server, I think could be better. This tool doesn't have this.

The ability to get another license if you need another tool, or to license specific aspects that may not be covered under your existing license could be better. Right now, it's not easy to switch contracts. The licensing policy needs more flexibility.

There may be some scalability issues.

We've used the solution for several years at this point. It's been a while. It's been as much as perhaps nine or ten years now.

The stability is there when you implement this generic service. We had to migrate in a bad scenario, due to the fact that we suffered from several issues. I still implemented it in one server to collect all the information. The product worked well and maintained its stability in general.

While I've never tried to scale the solution, the potential to scale looks fine. It's pretty dated, however, and I'm personally looking for another solution for that aspect.

We have about 20 people using the solution currently.

We're actually in the process of looking for another tool that would be able to collect information for us. I'm not sure if we'd increase the usage of this tool for that purpose.

I've never dealt with technical support. We have an IT team that deals with issues and any problems are typically handled internally. I wouldn't be able to comment on their knowledgeability or responsiveness due to my lack of experience dealing with them.

I don't recall using a different solution in the past.

The initial setup isn't overly complex. It's straightforward.

The deployment took about three weeks across ten servers.

We handled the implementation ourselves in-house. We didn't need any consultants or integrators to assist us.

I don't deal with the licensing or billing aspect of the solution and therefore can't speak to the exact costs of the product.

We might be considering looking into other solutions in the future.

We're a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

This solution's deployment is in the server through our machine. We have maybe eight or ten data machines with it.

I'd recommend this solution for larger implementations.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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. 

I look after the infrastructure side of Lookers. We have 8000 users, 400 various servers, and 190 sites. We've been rolling the product out and are relying on the infrastructure purely for the whole of our business.

We've managed to cut down on our P1 escalations by around about 70 percent. We have 24/7 monitoring and the notifications are great.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. We tend to keep about 100 days worth of logs. Therefore, we can create patterns in terms of load against different times, and downtime, as well. When housekeeping jobs are run, then we get periods where resources are tested and high. So, it's a case for us we're able to use scalability, across Azure and AWS for Elastic. Thus, it's helped us in terms of planning our actual infrastructure against performance and things.

This solution provide us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure for management reporting. Stats-wise, we're able to get reporting out-of-the-box from PRTG. For our executive board, we're able to provide valid stats of what we are saving in terms of revenue in regards to the infrastructure of our business.

It is a central solution in terms of how to actually use it. It has a very easy dashboard. Everything is concise. We are able to create custom sensors. For different parts of the business, we have many products across many environments, and it works for everything.

It is very broad in regards to what it can actually cover. We look after corporate environments for websites and SQL Server, and it's just a one stop solution for us. It also works well out-of-the-box.

The remote probes are great because they lessen the load across to the main server. The probes work really well, and we have probably about 15 of them now across all our environments, which definitely increases performance.

Sensors are out-of-the-box and provide some good coverage, but we have a lot of custom sensors, as well. With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied.

Less than one year.

The solution is very stable. We get monthly patches which are released by Paessler. We actually have a change window where we put those in place. We have around 98 percent uptime. Whenever we've had any downtime, it's usually our own infrastructure which causes it.

We have a clustered environment using sort of a DR scenario across our data centers in Manchester and Belfast. So, when one is down, the other up.

At the moment, we have a limit of 10,000 sensors. That is the supported level, in terms of the license that we have. While we can increase that, it's at our own risk. After that, the product is not supported in terms of the extra sensors that we put in. Therefore, it is a case of how we use the actual load on the software ourselves.

So, we have the maximum license of 10,000 sensors, but we could do more.

10,000 sensors can be exceeded but it is not best practice. 

The technical support has been very good. Initially, when we did the setup, we called on support quite a bit. With NetFlow, which is the firewall monitoring, there was a lot to get into place and getting it visible within PRTG, but the support was a great help.

We used a product called SolarWinds in the past, and its cost was high. Whereas, PRTG came in at a third of SolarWind's cost. 

SolarWinds was limited in terms of its support, as it was agent-driven, so each device had to have an agent installed. Whereas, with PRTG, it just listens via SNMP; nothing needs to be installed on the product. This was a big thing for us in terms of supporting and maintaining it.

We used to have a lot of downtime and have definitely been able to improve that.

Because we had no training, there was a sort of a steep learning curve, but we managed to get through it.

It took three months from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure.

We did the deployment in-house.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. For on call call outs, it helps with downtime, primarily. We're a retail business, so time is cost for us, and downtime is lost revenue. So we've able to reduce the amount of downtime that we used to have. We cover over 190 car dealerships around the country, and if an email goes down or the Internet goes down, we're able to combat that now ahead of time.

Cost was a factor when selecting this solution, but it just did everything we wanted it to do. The key thing was having it agentless, so we didn't have to maintain the local nodes.

Our licensing costs are 10,000 euros over three years. We've a three year contract with that, then we will just maintain it on a yearly basis.

SolarWinds was something that we re-evaluated. We were also using ManageEngine and Zabbix.

I came on board when we were downloading an evaluation of the actual software. We were doing our due diligence across other platforms/software, and PRTG came out top. 

Part of the pilot phase was to see how much load it would have on our network, and if there would be any sort of bottlenecks. We have been pretty happy with it. It has not had any sort of flow back on us, as a business.

It is a one stop solution for us. It covers all aspects of the business that we need for principal monitoring. Obviously, depending on the organization, it won't work for everyone. Some companies may have more locked down network rules. For companies like ours, in terms of a one stop solution across all of the environments, I would definitely recommend it.

The desktop app is something that is not been used that much because we tend to use the web UI. As the main infrastructure team, we do use the desktop, but we prefer the web UI.