PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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. 

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.

• We run two data centers and are a hosted voice provider. 
• We have an Azure presence. 
• We use PRTG as a monitoring solution to effectively monitor all of our servers, routing infrastructure, and switches. 
• We have some Session Border Controllers, which are effectively Voice Firewalls. We monitor the uptime and availability of those via things like Ping. However, we are also using SNMP sensors. 
• We've written some SQL queries that PRTG is utilizing. 
• We check things, like error logs, through PRTG.
• We are feeding things, like system log messages. 
• We use SNMP Traps.

The scheduling has improved organization, effectively the ability to set maintenance windows where alerts won't go off on an evening. We have an on call router, as many businesses do. In our previous on call solution, we would be inundated with information that would come through outside of working, core business hours, which meant that the on call staff, like myself, were woken up when we didn't need to be. Whereas, with PRTG, it has been great. We can go in, and say "We only care about these core set of criteria outside of this time period." 

If there are upgrades, or things where we know alerts will be generated, we can go in and suppress those. While quite a simple feature, it is comprehensive, and it has a lot of capability to it.

The product is easy to use. The web interface is fantastic. It is very easy to create a user, giving it to someone with little explanation of how to use it. That is its biggest strength. 

It is very colorful. We have used it in quite an open office environment. We have screens on maps that we've made, which is great when customers come in. It gives them a clean visual.

There is a great variety or sensors. We use the custom SNMP sensors quite a lot, where you can import MIB files. The sensors has some cool little tools, as well, which you can use for modifying MIB files and importing them to PRTG. 

It is nice to have one place where all the information is right there in front of us.

The capacity planning is quite good, as you can monitor the CPU increase over time. While it is a manual process, we can go in and correlate it against an increase in user count, etc.

The feature set is very strong compared to other products that I have used. It's great, because it does everything that we need it to do. It's easy to use. It looks great when you present it in an open office environment. If you have it onscreen, it displays the information nicely. The ability to set thresholds against sensors are great. 

The desktop app is terrible. If I had to pick any flaw with the product, that is it. It seems like they haven't updated it. It has been six months since I last used it, and while they may have done something since, it was somewhat clunky. We use 4K resolutions on our laptops, and it didn't work properly. So, we had a few problems with the desktop app.

I would like to see improvements on the desktop app and mobile app. We use the mobile app a bit. However, since we try to keep our data centers really fenced and secure, we don't use it extensively, just in our offices. Some improvements to the desktop application would be great. 

The thing that we do struggle with a bit is in the historic data. If I want look over 30 days, because it averages out onto one graph, you can't zoom in and drill down information. E.g., if we had a problem with something a week ago, I can't really go back in and drill into what that might be, because it has already averaged it out over that time. While I get that this might be for technical reasons, it is still a bit of a limitation.

We run it in a cluster, so we have two that run together. The cluster behind it is sketchy at times. Maybe that might be due to a configuration on our side. 

From the stability point of view, it's 90 percent there.

Now that we have the distributor remote probes, it is pretty strong. The product used to be affected by load. This was because we were exceeding their recommendations. If you follow the recommended hardware guidelines and keep the sensor count to what they recommend, then it is pretty stable.

The remote probe thing is great. We have multiple data centers with multiple regions that we have to monitor. It's nice to know that all we have to do is throw up a remote probe into one of these areas, then have it talk back to the master cluster. We don't have to worry about anything outside of that. We don't have to worry about deploying brand new PRTG servers, as it's a lightweight installer. From there, we can even do an auto scan.

If we do build an entire new data center, we can just install a probe, get it to scan its local subnet, then feed that information back, which is really good.

The solution can 100 percent grow with our business.

The technical support seems to be quick, clever, and has a comprehensive knowledge base online, which is fantastic.

We have never really had a point where we were like, "We want to do this," but PRTG was the limiting factor. If we do ever hit that point, which we do on occasion, the technical support is brilliant. 

You can go to the technical support, and say, "We want to achieve this." For example, we wanted to compare two links in completely different data centers. We wanted a way where could present a graph on the screen that would compare the two and see how they were doing against each other. We didn't know how to do it. We couldn't figure out how to do it, so we approached PRTG. They said, "It's fine. You just want to do a custom sensor and follow these steps." 

If we do ever hit walls, we go to the technical support. To be fair, we rarely seem to hit any walls.

Before PRTG, we used something called MRTG, which was an open source alternative. Previously, it was very clustered, small monitoring systems which were just syslog-based with  big text files. It was alerts generated for just about everything. We had no central way of doing anything, and it got to the point where it was unmanageable. It became a case of needing one solution which could come in and just do everything.

The remote probes are great. We had some base core probes starting up, where they would collapse under the stress and the load. Setting up the remote probes has been great, especially the remote administration aspects of them. 

In the early days, we overloaded it a bit too much. We didn't distribute it out enough and had quite a lot of issues with it clustering, which I don't thing that we have entirely remedied now. However, its installers are quick and the web interface is exceptional. Once you get to that point, there are no problems at all.

We went direct to PRTG to buy it and implemented it ourselves.

It doesn't take long, maybe an hour, to do the setup and start receiving basic feedback on the functionality. Though, trying to get useful information, that can take a lot longer. Sometimes, there is a bit of information overload, which is not PRTG's fault. As users, you are quite eager to go scan everything and see what comes back. To really understand the information, sometimes it can takes months. However, that is not on the software.

It has saved time, because it makes it easier for us to find and identify problems. In the past, we might have gone to four or five different monitoring systems. Whereas, we now just go to one. It is one interface (webpage). We go there and find out everything that we want to know.

We paid quite a good chunk of money for it, but we don't have to pay for anything else (in terms of monitoring).

We bought a license for 4000 sensors.

We looked at the market, and it wasn't PRTG at first, which was just something we found from recommendations from other people along with a carrier that we worked with, a partner of ours, they actually used it. That was what sort of led us to it. They were using it for their end users, showing customers PRTG data files, stating, "We can give you all this information." We were like, "We want to do that as well!" So, we sort of stole it from them. 

We are extensively using its feature set, and there are a load of features in the product that which other solutions don't have.

It is abundantly helpful in bringing all our stuff in-house. Another platfrom that we use is SolarWinds Orion, which is a pure network monitoring tool. PRTG is much more reliable, easier to use, and the information is more clear and concise.

PRTG is great for everyone. It is really broad, and you can use it as intrinsically and technically as you want. At the same time, you can get some nice, clean, concise front-ends. We use it every day. We rely on it heavily and trust it. We have so many people that use it, and I receive very little complaints about it. The only problems we have: The desktop app is not great, and every now and then, we have issues with the clustering. 

PRTG has everything pretty much hammered down. They should keep releasing sensors. They also seem to be producing stuff at quite a good rate.

The product has been great, as it has really brought together all our monitoring.

It provides a consolidated view of servers, switching, and network connectivity for the offices that I look after.

We are reactive sooner, when we need to be. There is less of waiting for our users to call, and say, "We have no Internet." It has allowed us to move a bit quicker.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. I have just taken over the IT infrastructure. I now have six months of history, so I know what my norms are. I can identify the quirks and issues from the history to keep going forward.

The most valuable feature is the notifications. As long as you spend time and think about what and when you want to be notified, it's always accurate. It is always there. I find things out before my Internet provider. 

Without all of the sensors or out-of-the-box functions, the notifications just don't work. For a small companies like us, it keeps an eye on our different offices and the few cloud servers that we have. We don't worry about them because the job is done.

The remote probe is fantastic, particularly since they started adopting. You can run them on smaller hardware. 

All of the sensors that I have needed in their adoption of some specific cloud have been great. 

The general server/client infrastructure is well done.

I don't like the desktop app and never use it. The web client is far easier to navigate with the notifications that pop up. The web app comes with everything that you need.

I preferred the look and feel of the previous version's user interface.

I would like to see more from an Office 365 standpoint, getting a more nitty-gritty app.

I am not sure the solution is giving me all the needed feedback that we need. When something goes off on our IT infrastructure, it does tell me. However, it would be nice if it gave more intuitive information, e.g., the hard drive has gone up by 60 percent in an hour. 

The stability is great in a 64-bit deployment. If anybody mixes it with a 32-bit speed version or with WMI sensors, I have found it to be wobbly. But, a 64-bit deployment is significantly stable.

The scalability is there, but smaller companies might need CAM software to be able afford the product. 

We have not used their technical support.

Our previous solution wasn't aware of what was going on across the environment. It was too focused on server infrastructure. This was a white label SolarWinds product through an MSP.

The initial setup is next, next, next, then done. You can't go wrong.

The installer works. It installs prerequisites. If you want to generate a remote probe for a site, at the other end of a VPN deployment, it creates everything encapsulated. You hit next four times, then it is installed. 

It took two hours from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. The hardest part was stopping auto discovery, because that goes out, finding everything. Sometimes, you're just not interested.

We deployed the product in-house.

The solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost effective by insourcing some of our functions that we used to throw over the garden fence (outsource).

It has saved us money because we are not paying a managed service provider to monitor 50 percent of our infrastructure. If there was a pricing/licensing model for smaller companies, this would provide me even more return.

Right now, the smallest sensor pack that they have is just a bit out of range for me, as a business. This kills me, as I need the product. Therefore, there is always a balance between needing to buy it or continuing their free version.

I would like better pricing models for smaller businesses. The free version is fantastic, but it's too restrictive. If they could just get up to 200 sensors for a reasonable fee for on-premise, I would give PRTG my credit card right now.

PRTG was the only vendor on the list. I knew what I wanted and knew I could get it.

Download the free installer, get it installed on a VM somewhere, and just watch. Pick a server, pick a network switch, and give it a go. 

Having used it from various iterations, the solution's feature set is great. There are moments where I want to go back in time and use the old IP tech product. However, as it evolves, with the quick releases that they bring, it really provides me an all-round product.

We use it to monitor services, things like hardware usage and whether hard drive space is running out. We use it for quite a lot of our networking solution as well. If there's a glitch in the network, anything that's abnormal, being able to see that show up is quite good.

The historical data provided by the solution helps optimize our network performance. We can see what's going on in our network infrastructure, more so in terms of our core networking. We can see which fiber links have been used heavily and, if they are used heavily, we can introduce more links to particular buildings or particular areas. It's more around the networking that we use the historical data. 

Also, if we have any issues with particular hardware, we can monitor those. We can monitor the network on those ports and come back with any issues or see if anything is flipping out or has stopped working. It's helpful being able to see that historical data.

It makes us more proactive, as opposed to reactive, with any issues. We tend to see issues occur before anyone else even knows about them. That's really useful for us. Particularly if there's any abnormality on the network, because of the historical data, we tend to know about it. PRTG tells us about anything that's out of the ordinary, which is good.

The sensors work well.

The remote probes seem to be a little bit buggy at times. They just stop working or they say they can't communicate. What we tend to do to is install the remote app onto the servers that we use. That seems to clear it up. As long as the app is there, all the probes seem to work fine.

It would be nice if, for the maps view - what you can lay out on the screens - there were a bit more functionality. It would help to be able to add titles to the top or to be able to change text sizes. There's not much you can really do with that in terms of configuration at the moment.

The stability has been good since it went in. It's never had any issues. It has just worked. It updates itself, it's easy to manage, easy to maintain.

It's difficult for me to judge the scalability. For what we use it for - I think we've got 1,000 sensors and we use about 800 or 900 at the moment - it all runs fine. I'm sure it would scale very well if we needed it to go any further than that. But for what we use it for, it's relatively small.

We haven't used the tech support or the online resources. It has always just worked; it's always been fine.

We have a third-party we go to if we get stuck with our network and they recommended PRTG. They actually started using it to troubleshoot some issues on our site, and from that, we decided it was something we wanted, so we invested in it from that point and set it up from scratch.

There wasn't really any system downtime which factored into our decision, but there were a few performance issues which PRTG helped us to solve. That was another reason to get it put in place, long-term.

The initial setup was surprisingly easy, the way the menus are all laid out. I set it up myself and it explained what to do, where to go. There were little pop-ups on the screen saying, "This is where to go for this, that's where to go for that." It made it all really easy to do. 

Also, adding servers or switches, it was auto-discovery, so I didn't have to do any config on that. You could just let it discover everything and then delete what you don't want.

It took about two days from the time I set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure.

PRTG was recommended to us and we went with it on the free basis to start with and then we moved to the paid version, for more sensors. We haven't really compared it to anything else, because it was recommended. Overall it seems very good.

Just install it, follow the instructions, and off you go. It just seems to work.

We do use the Desktop app and it's good, it works very well. It's very similar to the web-based system. It gets a little bit annoying sometimes because there are quite a lot of pop-ups. I'm sure we could turn them off but that's not something we've looked into. I actually find myself exiting the Desktop app, just to stop the pop-ups.

I wouldn't say that it has made our IT department more cost-effective at this point because, although we pay for it and we use it, we haven't really made any changes on the network because of PRTG. I don't think we've had any cost savings anywhere.

I would rate it eight out of ten. The desktop app seems a little clunky sometimes. There are a lot of pop-ups saying things are offline when they're not necessarily. That's more due to those probes. When we install the app on the servers there're no issues there, so we can get around that.

The primary use case if for monitoring bandwidth, uplinks and using SNMPs. We are slowly scaling out to monitor hard drive disk spaces, as well. 

Our bandwidth solution, which are the uplinks that we have at the moment for circuit breakouts, and ISPs don't give us the best information. So, we use what we can and monitor the uplinks before they hit the equipment.

Historical data provided by this solution helps us optimize our network performance by providing network trends. Therefore, we can go back 30 days or six months, saying to my boss, "We can see an upward trend over this amount, and these are our projections going forward." So, it allows us to predict and move forward.

We use a Citrix application, which we use to monitor certain ports and ensure we get response times that are essential. It makes it easier if we can benchmark scenarios rather than asking users if the speed has improved, etc.

This solution provides us with the needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It allows us to grab all the information from a single point of view.

The most valuable feature is being notified before we ask if there is an outage. Visibility is the main thing for us, which I can give to my boss. So, when people start asking him for information, he's not on the back foot straightaway. He can say, "Yes, we are experiencing this." We can at least get that information to the ISPs and provide them the correct timestamps and information, then go from there.

The sensors and remote probes are phenomenal. We use them for all of our global sites. The problem with our global sites are that they are all VPNs. If the link goes down, you can't monitor other solutions, as it just goes off the grid. Having remote probes allows them to still carry on and get the information that we need when it comes back up, sending the information to us.

We have been happy with the feature set, so far. It has compatibility with most of the product that we use, such as Juniper hardware.

They just released a newer version of the desktop app, a beta version, that I have been trialing out. I prefer the older version, only because of how the layout is designed, but they're making improvements to it all the time.

The clustering aspect needs improvement, as there is a bit of confusion about you do when hit that 5000 probe mark.

I would like there to be more cloud features with cloud stats. However, in every update, there seems to be more things add. 

I would also like there to be more APIs and access to them.

It is fairly stable. It gets a bit interesting the closer that we are etching in to the 5000 probe mark. 

There are some HA concerns. However, PRTG put that on the website and are not hiding it. One thing that I want to know, "Where the company is going with HA from here?"

Previously, we were easily under a 1000 sensors. We are now up to 3500. In the future, depending on how we scale out, we will be over the 5000 mark.

The product can easily grow with our business.

The technical support is good. They are fairly responsive. I have a ticket with them at the moment and am waiting to hear back on them, but it's all good.

For online resources, I pretty much go to Google more than anything else, rather than a dedicated place.

The time that it took to get the information required to be as proactive or reactive as possible is what drove us to PRTG. With the multitude of products that we had, it was the best solution since it allows us to see everything in one window.

We used the free trial of PRTG. Did a benchmark to see if the product is what we required, then went to the paid version.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just install it, and as long as you have got the right credentials and know the subnets to scan, it is fairly easy.

It took hours from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. However, in the time to get the core setup, we scaled it out for the rest of the business. The analysis that it provided was good and quick.

We implemented in-house.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective by saving. The product provide a single pane to see a lot of information, especially at an engineering level. Looking at multiple products takes more time. Having a single pane in effect can provide all the information in one place.

I had previously used PRTG 

Give it a shot. They have a free trial. If the product meets your needs, take it further. There is not much in terms of prerequisites, other than knowing the subnets and credentials.

The product does everything that we need it to do at the moment.