PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

PRTG has been a network monitoring solution for our company for over five years now. We constantly monitor our servers, switches, broadband. Anything that we can put a sensor on, it monitors. I monitor four domains and I use cross-domain network monitoring as well.

In terms of the historical data provided by the solution, I look at the network performance and, obviously, if I've got an offsite backup going through, I want to monitor what sort of impact that's had on the network. If it's detrimental, then I can change the times when the backups happen and make sure that there's not a severe impact on my local network.

Previously, other parts of the company have used different products, and PRTG has helped broaden their minds into what a decent piece of monitoring software actually does. I'm pushing it out further afield, which is why it's in four domains.

When it comes to helping our IT department to be more cost-effective, if I've got as-it-happens monitoring, I can deploy the resources to resolve the issues quicker.

One of the things I like is the fact that I can use it on my mobile phone. I use the mobile app and it alerts me if there is a problem. Obviously if I'm not in the office or available to get in. I can monitor it externally and am able to deploy resources to sort things out quickly.

The fact that I can use custom MIB files to customize my sensors for the things that are not there as a default is a good feature as well.

I use the Desktop app all the time, it's constantly on my taskbar so that I can monitor things. If there is a problem, it flashes up red and lets me know there's an issue and I get to deal with it almost immediately.

The remote probes are okay. I think that there could be more sensors available, especially with newer technologies coming along. It has been a bit stagnant. Unfortunately, it uses an almost "external workforce" through its forums to create new sensors.

Also, I have an issue with DFS, distributed file services. Currently, although there is a forum post with regards to the issue of PRTG and the DFS monitoring, there isn't one by default. I think it is quite a necessity that they make one, one that's actually easily integratable. Taking into account the difference between DFS and DFSR as well would be great. They need one that pulls up the report, shows you how much is out of sync, if it's out, and how much of a time difference there is between the synchronizations. Anything like that would be a help.

It's always on. I have a server dedicated to it, that's all it does. I've never had it fall down, ever.

With the remote probes, the ability to monitor external domains makes this product easy to scale.

I've only used the technical support a couple of times. There is a lot of information available on the forums. More than likely, if I have a problem, somebody else has had that same problem. The forums can help in that way to find a resolution.

Setup, is fairly straight-forward, but it can be a laborious task initially, once you have populated the sensors everything just ticks along nicely.

In-House setup but if there's a problem, I know that the support from PRTG is not far away.

The solution has definitely saved us time and money. Services need to be constantly monitored, if you don't have a good product to monitor these things you have to wait till something stops working and then use command-line tools to diagnose the issue. This is counter-productive.

Mostly I know if a DC is starting to go down because it stops responding to remote desktop session calls. I don't know why, but that's the first thing that goes down. It flags up that I can't get the user remote desktop and that's the first sign that that server is going to go down very soon.

At the moment I'm only using 500 sensors. I pay yearly, so it's a cost that's easily swallowed.

I have actually used other solutions, because I do look after four domains. Previously, they had other packages that were already there, and I still find PRTG to be the best.

PRTG is free for an initial trial of 30 days. Once you've used it, I think you'll find that it is a great product and well worth the investment.

The overall feature set is pretty good. It's not a complete feature set. I'd like to see more, but, as a general rule, I've been using it for over five years. I must be pretty happy with what it does, as it is.

I would rate the product at eight out of ten because there's always room for improvement. Nobody's going to be the best of the best. If a DFSR or DFS sensor were added, I'd give it a nine.

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.

The primary use case is for monitoring infrastructure: servers, printers, endpoints, and certain services on certain systems. We are alerted in regards to any issue with them.

The remote probes are absolutely fine. They allow us to connect from sites. We have a few different sites spaced across the UK. The remote probes serve a purpose, like separating stuff logically, which is handy. 

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. Though, we had a few issues with a specific performance, we managed to pin it down because it wasn't throttling in any way. Seeing the history six months ago compared to what it was six months down the line, where there have been more computers put on the site, we could start slowly seeing the bandwidth increase. Then, we were able to identify what the issue is, and resolve it.

In general, we can see trends for a lot of different things, such as hard drive space and bandwidth usage. We can see and plan for the future by knowing, "We're sort of at 75% capacity now. In three months time, we know we're going to be up to 90%,so we need to plan ahead for it, getting upgrades booked in place." Since things like this take time and effort, it's handy to see trends into the future of where our company is going.

The nitty-gritty that you can get down to in terms of monitoring individual things. While seeing if the service or hard drives have halfway fallen out is fine, being able to monitor stuff with custom scripts (such as SQL scripts) and know whether your data warehouse is built in the morning, this is something which ticks all the boxes for us.

The sensors work as they should. There are hundreds of thousands of them with custom scripts that you can put out there to do different things, like file counts, monitoring SQL Server databases, and specific entries. There are a plethora of sensors out there that are really cool.

It gives us feedback on our servers. For example, we've an ERP server which we monitor for certain files, and it allows us to go back and see that we had an influx around dinnertime or lunchtime of a certain number of files, so this was a busy period. It also provides us the feedback to go back to the business, and say, "This is a busy period of the day for us. Are there any resources that we need to ramp up during that time?"

I would like a live chat solution. This would be useful and handy, especially with the ability to provide logs and an overview of what we are doing at that moment in time to get answers to our questions. 

The setup aspect of it  and getting devices working needs improvement. The reliance between different devices, so if one device goes down on Ping, the whole network will go down if the roots goes down. So, the time it takes to set that up is a bit more than I would have liked and is a bit cumbersome to actually go through. That's the only side that I can see a bit of improvement on. Some sort of relationship between devices, making that a bit easier to see what would be useful.

The stability is absolutely spot on, in terms that it will never go down. 

The only sort of limitation is the actual probes. So, if you don't have enough probes on there, you can over flip them and cause the WMI sensors and SNMP sensors to sort of overload. Sometimes, they might timeout for a minute, but they do come back. 

We have close to a 1000 sensors on it. I'm sure there are other people out there with a lot more sensors with bigger infrastructures than us. It performs absolutely fine if you have a site which has got a 1000 sensors on it. 

We can just add another probe onto another server on the site and extend that by doubling up the capacity on it. So, it can go as large as we want it to.

The technical support is very interactive. They've invited us to go down to the computer museum down in Milton Keynes, where they run trips. You can go down, they put on lunch, then have Q&A and a bit of a demo. They're very interactive people. They have active forums, as well. If you ask a question, it's not just the employees who will answer. Other key users like to get into the nitty-gritty stuff, which is really good.

We had sort of massive bandwidth bottlenecks, where our sites used VoIP telephonics. So, when something was throttling the bandwidth for one site, they wouldn't be able to make telephone calls. We had a few instances of that before we got the PRTG product in place.

We knew we need to invest in a new solution because of the amount of time that we were spending manually checking if devices were up or not, then troubleshooting those instances, and where devices went down. We realized that we could have seen these a lot earlier and spent a lot less time on them, thus allowing us to have more time to spend doing actual project work rather than dealing with the break/fix side of things.

The initial setup is as straightforward as you want to make it. You will get out of it the time that you've put into it. It's absolutely fine and straightforward to the point. It's only when you go into more specific stuff, like custom sensors, then you might need a little technical support, but they are always there to help.

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

We used a reseller to purchase it. However, we just sort of integrated it ourselves.

We have gotten weeks and hours back from using the product.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The time that you spend looking at stuff and monitoring services for updates, PRTG notifies you when stuff needs to be done. You could spend eight hours a week looking at stuff manually or you could just wait for PRTG to email you. Once you put in a couple of hours setting it up, it will just notify you to the business critical stuff, allowing you to plan ahead for your next week or month.

While I am not the person who deals with pricing, I would say that we pay around 1000 pounds a year.

We looked at PRTG and SolarWinds. From a cost side perspective, compared to PRTG, and from what you get back from it, PRTG was sort of a hands down the winner. We had read a few different reviews of PRTG and had a few of the colleagues that we'd worked with in the past who now used it at their new businesses and recommending it. These were sort of the main driving factors for going down that route.

Spend your time looking into PRTG and give it a trial. They're more than happy to give you a trial license for 30 days or so. Get it up and running on a certain site or system that you want to monitor just to see what you think of it. 

It is a very in-depth solution. You have to take the time to get it up and running the way you want. If you want it to be the best monitoring system, you have to put the time into it, such as creating a reliance on other sensors. E.g., if a ping sensor goes down, you're not going to get a response from the other sensors 99% of the time if the device isn't working.

They've spent a good amount of time refining and turning it into a really robust product.

We don't use the desktop app. We just use the web browser.

We use PRTG to monitor all of our business critical and distributed systems around the areas that we operate in the UK. This is ensure they have good system uptime and can demonstrate against SLAs.

The historical data provided by the solution is one of the main reasons why we went with PRTG. It gives you that granular view to be able to go back 24 hours, two days, a month, or year. You can start building powerful data patterns with this technology platform.

One of the things which became apparent was that we didn't know when things were going down out of hours unless somebody sat and was there watching the consoles. Nobody knew when things were going down. Now, one of the things that we've noticed is we are picking up when we are having out of hours outages. The solution is starting to correlate data so we can speak to the relative representatives and make sure the outages stop happening.

The solution provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It gives us really good quality of service when it comes to monitoring of available space and available resources. It allows us to preempt issues before they become a problem for the business.

It is easy to use and intuitive, which is really important. It does what it says on the box by giving you a visual of the state of what is going on at any one time. 

The feature set does what it says on the box. It does the monitoring well. It doesn't try to do anything which it is not supposed to. It does what it does well.

There is a good selection of sensors and probes in it.

While the web application side of things is fantastic, the desktop app is the one area where it do with some improvement. From a user's perspective, I would like to be able to get more out of the desktop offering as opposed to where we are now with it. It could be stronger. There are opportunities there that you don't have with the web-based application to do some interesting and innovative stuff.

An important thing is to keep up with the technology which is now coming out. There is obviously a lot of generic stuff in the solution, and there is also a lot of new tech which is coming out that people need to be able to monitor.

We have had no issues. It just works and is up 24/7/365. Every update which comes out is rock solid.

We are a fairly large implantation, as we have currently 2500 nodes. We are just about to double that. The solution allows you to keep on doubling and doubling, as much as you need. The only restriction is the platform that you put it on. When you get into those larger areas, from what I understand, the performance on PRTG is just as good as it is on the smaller implementations.

We have contacted their tech support a few times, which is really good. They got back to us very quickly with a good level of technical knowledge.

The previous solution that we had (SolarWinds) was giving us a lot of false positives. We were spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. We had used PRTG before, and it has always been a solid platform. 

We were experiencing network and system downtime before implementing PRTG. This was that a driving factor to switch solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. Within a half an hour, we had it set up and running. The setup is intuitive and the install is very much wizard-driven. There is no real agenda behind it. It is very much just click and go once you have finished your scanning, then it works straightaway.

It took two to three hours from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. It was very quick.

We used a reseller (Axis) for the deployment, and our experience with them was really good.

The solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. It cuts down on downtime. This means we are not chasing after things that we don't need to chase. It is bringing to our attention the operational problems that we have, so we can focus our attention on those, instead of running around trying to figure out what the problem is.

It is constantly ensuring our systems are up and running. They are in a solid position. If you look at the costs attributed to downtime, those have been removed.

It is about £4,500 for the first year, then about another 15 to 20 percent annually after that. So, we are looking at about £1000 running costs a year. When you think about how much an outage costs per minute, it's negligible.

We just considered PRTG when moving away from SolarWinds.

Look at what it is you want your organization to be able to do and what it is you need to monitor. Then, concentrate on the key elements first. Don't try and overcloud what you're trying to do. Start with your core stuff and work outwards, then you will always get a good solid solution.

It is a really good, solid product, which does exactly what we need it to do.

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 use it to monitor our critical infrastructure, i.e., the services our users depend on. It is very useful for us to have that holistic view, e.g, one single view of the dashboards. The product is a useful kit to summarize the health of our infrastructure.

It has made us more proactive. Instead of waiting for the users to report failures to us, we can very quickly see things on a nice, easy dashboard and respond to it quickly enough. Then, hopefully, we can avoid having an issue experienced by the end user. 

We can use the data which comes out of PRTG to look at capacity and plan to grow particular areas of the business. It provides statistics about application or service, monitoring both of endpoints of that service. Therefore, we can look at the middle, and say, "How many people are actually using this?" We use the traffic statistics and other things from PRTG to help us predict growth and more.

The dashboarding is simple to use. We have one of the full dashboards, which is shaped like a donut. We call it the donut doom. If we ever see red on the donut doom, we know we need to respond quickly. It's a good, solid dashboard, which is really good for us.

There is a simplicity to setting up the extra sensors. It's really easy for us to build infrastructure and start monitoring very quickly.

The sensors are very simple to use and quick to deploy. I love once the credentials are added at the higher level that we can simply ignore the credential side of things and not to worry about them. You put them in at the top, then they filter down through to all of the various platforms.

We use the remote probes a lot for our branch offices. Instead of deploying the full instance of PRTG, we'll put a remote probe out there. This simplifies the whole deployment for us.

We use a lot of NetFlow sensors for our network equipment. Those NetFlow sensors help us to determine how much of our pipe is being used for particular applications. We use this quite a lot.

The feature set is brilliant. It does everything that we need it to do. If it doesn't, then there is a nice forum that we can jump on. 

We would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us.

I've never had to play around too much with stability. We installed it on the server, put the certificate in, got our URL, and put the DNS record in, then it just does its thing. 

Once you start going above 5000 sensors, things do start to get a bit shaky. There are some best practice out there that you will need to adopt and be aware of.

PRTG has a clustering service, which is useful. We have had a bit of an issue with the WMI at one point where we just had too many WMI queries, but when we just swapped them to different sensor types, it become more efficient. This is not really a negative on scalability as much as ensuring to follow best practices.

The solution can grow with our business. If we need to expand the number of sensors that we are using or expand the number of remote offices that we have, we set up the remote probes with standard templates for sensors or services, and it works.

The tech support has been fine. I haven't had any issues with the tech support at all. They tend to say, "You need to read this part of the manual." 

Generally, it's not the solution or the products in the role area. It's normally the way it's being deployed, the way it's being used, or if you're vastly oversubscribing certain areas of the system. It's just about knowing and being familiar with the system, then you don't have to really talk to tech support.

Nine times out of ten, someone else will have already asked the same question on the PRTG forum as us. 

We implemented the free solution in this company, but it is what I was familiar with. I have used the solution in previous companies before. We did have another monitoring solution, but the speed in which we could get the solution running and my familiarity with it was really helpful.

It was also very easy to take my colleagues through it in the new company in which I was joining. Everyone was quickly on board with it, and we used it as an extra in-depth monitoring on top of our other monitoring stuff.

We experienced network and system downtime before implementing this solution. It was a driving factor in the decision to implement this solution. We had a lot of issues with disk space utilization. We are a quite big company, so we have a lot of people with a lot of files flowing around. We needed an extra level of monitoring on our disks and services.

The initial setup was great and straightforward. Deployment was quick and painless. It just worked out-of-the-box. We were quite surprised that we really didn't have to do much tweaking for it.

Once the services started running, It immediately (within an hour) started monitoring the probe health first. Therefore, we received immediate feedback about the infrastructure that is supporting the service. 

We did everything in-house.

We pay nothing for it. Its 100 sensors have allowed us to put a magnifying glass on some systems, providing an extra layer of detail. Therefore, our outgoing is nothing and our incoming is a lot of useful data that we can react to proactively.

This solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. We can predict a lot of failures and schedule work a lot more effectively. This means we don't need as many people. When you don't know what's going on under the hood, you're always expecting things to go wrong. Then, you have extra staff around to make sure if things do go wrong, you can fix them quickly. 

In my company now, we are using the free version. 

In previous companies, we have had unlimited licenses and going beyond 10,000 sensors with 50 different branch offices.

Primarily, we use PRTG because I am familiar with it. We have licenses for SCOM, but the complexity in setting up that type of solution put us off. It is very much a big beast of a solution. We needed something quick and simple that we could just throw in and get some good figures out of it quickly.

Take a couple of hours in an afternoon and deploy the free version. See what type of sensors are out there, then give it a go. You will find very quickly that it's quite a simple system to use. It doesn't take a lot of time or expertise to set it up and get some good data out of it.

We haven't really used the desktop app. We normally use the central server, then we have the monitoring setup in such a way that we don't need to deploy any extra elements. It just monitors things via the SNMP or WMI. We tend to use the web browser a lot. 

• 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.

We use it to manage customers and to keep an eye on when stuff goes down or when stuff is not working as intended. We monitor mostly servers, but we use it to monitor websites and some of the network infrastructure as well.

With the monitoring, certainly for some of our customers that are hosting websites, we've added in PRTG's advanced http sensors, to provide them site monitoring in addition to the server monitoring which we were doing. We can pass the information on to them when they have issues, as opposed to them not knowing until one of their customers contacts them.

I would say the solution makes our IT department more cost-effective because it allows us to respond to things a lot quicker. We can get an idea of where a problem lies in the server, if it's hardware. It saves a bit of time of trying to track down a problem.

It also tells us when we're running into problems with certain bits of infrastructure that we're monitoring.

• It's really easy to use.
• You can see as soon as there is a problem and you can track it down pretty quickly.
• You don't have to go through loads of options to find when something goes wrong.

It's very easy to manage when you've got time to do some work on it: things like adding devices, adding groups, adding sensor clusters, and being able to clone and move stuff around.

I really like the Desktop app. I'm not a big fan of the web app because I've had some browser issues with it. Since finding the desktop app, I have used that exclusively.

Thinking about the overall feature set, I've had no problems with the features that I use. It hasn't happened that I've thought, "I wish I could do this," without being able to usually find an option to do it. Among those options are things like multiple users, different types of reporting, and different actions that occur after a sensor starts. There's always been something in there. I wanted it to auto-confirm when an error does come up in the test lab and, on PRTG's website, they had an API string to do that. Everything that I've needed to do, I've been able to find in the program or on their website.

It has to be installed on a Windows machine. We'd prefer it if we could install the actual control panel on a Linux.

In addition, I wouldn't mind better categories for the sensors. When I go to add a new sensor for a new device, there are some categories in there already, and they can be filtered out, but there's quite a large pool of sensors. That's one thing that I always struggle with. When I want to go in and find something quite specific, I have got to scroll down and scroll down to find what I'm actually looking for, if I want something that I may not have used before. 

With their "recommend sensors" feature, I wouldn't mind seeing that being a bit more able to scan the device that it goes on, as it doesn't necessarily pick up everything that is on there, as it should.

It's rock solid. We restart it, and the Windows machine it sits on, once a month because it's recommended to do so, to update it. We have not had any issues with it going down or not working as intended.

We've been able to scale it up as we've brought more and more customers on. Having a sensor pool which we can dip into and use has been good. If we brought on five or ten customers, we could scale it up quite quickly with cloning and copying of templates.

We started off using open source, Nagios/Cacti-type monitoring software utilities. Yes, they're open source and they don't cost you anything, but adding devices is quite cumbersome, the management is quite difficult, and the training is more difficult. Whereas, the UI of PRTG is much easier to use; much more intuitive. 

Everybody generally starts off open-source, something that won't cost you much, but they soon realize the limits of open-source. PRTG is a company that has invested a lot of time and effort building it to make easy to use, to give it a nice UI, and to make it as responsive as it is. It's just a natural progression.

The driving factor in the decision wasn't that we experienced system downtime, it was the fact that we needed something more enterprise-oriented and something that was easier to use and manage, which PRTG is, compared to Nagios. When something like Nagios breaks, it's quite difficult to get it working again, whereas with PRTG, once you buy a block of sensors you get some support for 12 or 24 months, and you've got somebody to fall back on if you ever need it.

It was already in place when I started with the company. We've moved it across to another system and I've re-set that up and it was just a matter of installing it, setting it up. It was fine, no problems. The usual control-panel install wizard made it very easy to import our old data from our previous install into it as well.

It took about 15 to 20 minutes, from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on the IT infrastructure. That was after we imported all the other data into it.

ROI is hard to measure on something like this. It has helped us out in identifying problems that are likely to happen or that are about to happen or even when they happen. We get notified as quickly as possible. To measure the ROI on that is not an easy thing to do. But, in terms of customer service, it has helped us because we are obviously much more proactive. We notice things before a customer reports them to us. For customer service there would have been some ROI, but it is hard to quantify.

One thing I like is that when you buy sensors, it's a perpetual license, so once you buy 2,000 sensors, you've got 2,000 sensors; it's not a recurring cost. With some products, it's a subscription model where you pay every year.

We looked at SolarWinds. If I remember correctly, it came down to cost. In that regard, PRTG did work out cheaper. In addition, one of our engineers had previously worked with PRTG so he had a bias toward PRTG already. It just made sense to go with it.

You can get the trial version of PRTG, you can get a load of sensors and the actual software package to try. Install it, give it a go, it is very easy to set up. SNMP is very easy to set up on Windows and Linux, and you've got a lot of options within PRTG so you really need to get stuck in and mess about with it to see if it has what you need in it.

In terms of the sensors and remote probes, I don't have many problems with it because everything seems to be covered by it. I've not found something that I've not been able to monitor or that I've not been able to find data for. I have no problems with the probes when it comes to actually sending them and receiving the data. They just go out, collect the data. I have no network problems with it.

We only monitor certain parts of the network with PRTG, but we do compare some of the historical data to real-time data, just to make sure everything's running smoothly and nothing looks out of place.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. It is a very solid product; it does what we need it to do. There are a few bits and pieces that I wish I could do with it which, due to what it is, they don't offer.