PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

First let me start by saying I have been using system monitoring tools for a very long time. I first cut my teeth with HP Openview "back in the day" and most recently with Microsoft System Center which I have now completely replaced as a monitoring and alerting system with a bit of software called PRTG from a company called Paessler.Here are the top 10 strong points of PRTG: - Rapid deployment - But, there are best practices for sure... - Highly scale-able - Intuitive interface - quick learning curve - Inexpensive to license - Accurate - Works with most infrastructure without customization - Updated often and very easy to update - Good support from the vendor - Kind to diskspace consumption - not sure how they do it! - Easy to re-architect as your infrastructure changesMy company runs a large scale SAAS infrastructure with a large mix of technologies. PRTG is the first software product we have used to accurately alert the right people of trouble. This has been a huge boost in customer satisfaction for sure.

There is not much not to love in this software but one item on my wishlist that has yet to be addressed in an intuitive way is the ability to use and manage templates. This would allow you to apply templates easily and then modify templates easily.

Our primary use case is for monitoring numerous services; internet providers, university campuses, etc. We are resellers. 

It's great that we can create a dashboard inside software monitoring, and access many other websites, it is a complete monitoring solution.

I'd like to see the inventory of the device improved. 

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The technical support is fine, I've never had a problem. 

Deployment was completed within a day. 

I recommend this solution and rate it a 10 out of 10. 

On-premises

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.

On-premises

It is for monitoring the up/down of our core infrastructure: Internally, the edge routers in our major occupancies, core switches, access switches, etc. It sort of give us real-time feedback for what is going on.

We use it to determine if a switch is up, our traffic is running optimally or at a normal rate.

We set up the solution, and it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure instantaneously. Because of the sensors that we are using, the graph started populating straightaway. Also, Pings and SNMPs were coming back straightaway. So, within 24 hours, we had a days worth of logs to look through.

Yesterday, we were having an issue with one of our major occupancies. We were able to quickly determine whether or not it was because of network performance. Because we could literally just look at the graph and screen on our wallboard, and say, "It wasn't because of network utilization." 

It is easy to rule things out, or say, "Because we had this huge spike it traffic, it maxed out our line. Therefore, it was a bandwidth problem."

The real-time monitoring and alerting are its most valuable features. 

Sometimes, it is difficult to drill down further to get information, e.g., if we saw spike in traffic, then we would want to drill down and find out what is causing that spike in traffic. Now, it could be because of the way we're using it, but we find that it' difficult to do, which is why we are using another product for this.

SolarWinds has server application monitors (SAMs), which we are using to check our processes on critical systems to see if they were to go down that we would get an alert for it. Because it's all network-based, it would be great if this was something that we could have included.

I have never seen it go down. I think it has only ever gone down when I have been messing with it and caused it to go down. The solution is nice and stable.

The scalability is really good. At one point, I did enable a sort of clustering and found that much easier than SolarWinds. 

SolarWinds clustering is an absolute nightmare, whereas clustering with PRTG, was ridiculously simple. In order to scale and add more load balancing, PRTG was a lot smoother and quicker to do it. 

Obviously, there are different levels. We're currently limited to 100 sensors, but if we were to purchase an enhanced version of it, we could scale to whatever we purchased.

I haven't used the technical support. I haven't needed them.

We were actually using PRTG before we were using SolarWinds. From the feature side of things, I don't think that we ever fully implemented and tested PRTG. Then, we started testing SolarWinds and found SolarWinds was giving us a more detailed reporting. So, that is the avenue we went down for actually purchasing a product. We chose SolarWinds, but we still keep a hold of PRTG for its real-time stuff.

We just installed it, then started configuring sensors. That was about it. There wasn't much to it.

We set it up in-house.

The historical data does not help us optimize our network performance, as we are not really using it to that level. We could, but because we are only on the free version, we have a limited number of sensors. Therefore, we are not monitoring as much as we want to be to obtain historical information.

We also have monitoring with SolarWinds, as well. What we find is that SolarWinds is great for reporting and delving back into logs, but PRTG is better for that instant on knowing what is going on right now.

There are quite a wide array of different sensors with PRTG. However, we are only really utilizing SNMP, Ping, and similar functions at the moment. Because our NetFlow data goes into SolarWind, we want that report inside it. We find SolarWinds better for this. Though, we know that we could do this if we wanted and put some NetFlow data into PRTG with its multiple different sensors.

We are not using the solution to its fullest capacity. At this point, I don't think we will because we are so involved with SolarWinds. We are getting out of PRTG what we want to get out of it, but we are not getting enough from it that we could ditch SolarWinds and move over to it.

For the solutions features that we are using, they are great. We have no issues with the feature set.

I don't think we've ever used the desktop app, as I didn't know there was a desktop app. We just use the web.

We primarily use the solution as a monitoring tool. We use it mostly for looking at changes in the resources' behavior. Pretty much it's the use we have primarily. The second one is to provide a report of the total consumption of the resources that we use. We pretty much have to monitor systems.

We haven't played with many options. I know it offers a lot of different plugins for certain solutions, such as a VPN monitor and also website monitor. We haven't configured those as we are under the management direction, and if they don't allow it, pretty much we use the options that we have and the plan for the department. 

The simplicity of the software is great.

The configuration is not hard to handle. 

The installation is not that complex. 

The best part of the tool is the simplicity of the tool itself.

The product can scale well.

The database needs improvement. They use plain text for the data. That's probably not a concern for them, however, sometimes we need to enhance some of the reports and we cannot do that. If they move to a transactional database, it will be better for users to get access to different kinds of reports. Right now, it's pretty straightforward in terms of what you can do, and you cannot apply customization or get specific data.

They have something called maps where you can configure or set up a view for the different devices. They have different options than the ones that we have, such as a pie chart option, and likely offer different kinds of graphs. It would be nice to show you the real-time status using these graphs. 

We've been using the solution for about three years at this point. 

The stability is great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good.

The scalability of the product is quite good.

I contacted technical support in the past. The few times I got a pretty straightforward answer, although the service was probably not the fastest. It was by email, which can be less immediate than a phone call. In general, however, it was good.

We're also using OneView for HPE BladeSystem for monitoring.

The product was easy to implement. The simplicity of the tool is the key to successful sales on this monitoring solution. All the options are straightforward for the users as well. It's not that complex to implement.

To fully deploy the solution into our environment took a couple of days.

We're using the latest version of the solution. We updated the version less than a month ago.

I'd advise potential new users, if they are looking for an easy tool to deploy and manage, it's the way to go. If they are looking for complex reports, I will say stay away from this product.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We use it for monitoring items on the network: switches, servers, and other devices, to guarantee or at least monitor uptime.

It has provided us with early warning for potential issues and has stopped potential downtime before it occurs. It also reduces the amount of wasted time that comes with dealing with things after the fact, so scheduled maintenance can be more easily performed.

It provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure by telling us whether things are up, what the current usage is, and whether we need to plan to modify that. It tells us whether there are spikes in usage that either need to be addressed within the application, based on additional resourcing for the application, or at the server level.

The most valuable feature is the alerting when there's downtime. 

Also, the feature whereby it shows when my hard drives are moving towards thresholds that would be considered outages, before they reach that point - that is valuable. That's the main thing we want out of it, a warning.

The Desktop app is fine, it's easy enough to use, it installs relatively easily. It's lightweight, it sits in the corner, and it pops up if there's a real issue. I tend to use the web interface to actually do any of the work within it. But the Desktop app sits there in the background and it works fine.

The sensors are good, there's a large availability, and they provide relevant information. The way those sensors are deployed allows you to modify and tweak them, based on what you want to achieve out of them. But you can equally remove sensors with relative ease if they automatically include things that you don't want to monitor.

I would like to see Office 365 monitoring. Essentially, it doesn't do it. I assumed not at all, but apparently it does it slightly. However, due to issues with APIs, they currently don't provide full monitoring for O365. It is something they're looking into.

I've not seen any outages with it so I'd say it's stable.

It's scaled as far as we've needed it to so far and we're planning to roll it out further. It scales perfectly fine. It's pretty easy to introduce new offices. We've got it on a core set of offices at the moment, but adding additional offices as they've been deployed has been a straightforward, easy process.

I've not had to use the tech support. I do use the online resources and, from that point of view, there seems to be a reasonably extensive knowledge library that answers any questions I've had to address.

We previously used SCOM as a solution and migrated to this because the feature set is quite similar, but it cuts out a lot of the noise and the complexity of the configuration. We started looking for other solutions which would give us something that was easier to configure whilst producing the same amount of information.

The initial setup was fine. It was straightforward enough.

I didn't personally install it so it's difficult for me to say how long it took from the time it was installed until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure, but I assume it was within minutes of it actually being installed. The installation of the sensors is quite quick, so it would have been five minutes or ten minutes after installation.

We had somebody internally who had used the product previously at another company. They were able to install it due to intrinsic knowledge of the product.

It's possible that it has saved us money, but it's difficult to measure because it's a sort of intangible in terms of downtime and the cost of downtime, depending on the system.

We did look at a couple of other solutions, but partly because we had somebody with in-house knowledge of PRTG and ability in it, they essentially gave it reasonably good reviews from their personal usage. So we chose to go with something that was a known factor.

We would have looked at stuff like SolarWinds and some others, but off the top of my head, I can't remember which ones.

It is a good solution, one that is at least worth investigating.

The historical data provided by the solution would potentially help optimize network performance, but it's not something I directly look at so I can't really pass along an opinion on that.

Overall, the feature set looks good. It covers off a lot of what we're interested in.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten. It does a lot of the things that I need it to do in terms of monitoring. It provides great feedback and produces it in an easily consumable way. The caveat is that it doesn't quite cover off everything I need it to do at the moment.

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.

Accessibility, ease of use (Web GUI, MobileApps). In general, compared with other software, it's easy to install/implement and build structures. It's also cost effective.

Every department in my company uses this tool for SMS or e-mail alerts regarding its devices.

Mostly, this software has sensors for devices to monitor specs and you can build or develop or modify various sensors, according to your company's needs. But you may need to do that with coding or plugins or with the support of Paessler AG, the manufacturer.

About one and a half years.

It depends on your company's IT infrastructure. Mostly security issues (firewall/proxy permissions, etc.) are the ones that could cause stability problems in my experience.

Because we are a relatively new user, I can't really comment on this.

Support is mostly done via support tickets. Nothing is perfect, I’d give them eight out of 10. They do as much as they can.

We have used SAP ITIM. We switched because PRTG is more cost effective then SAP ITIM monitoring.

Initial setup is straightforward. Not a big deal in general.

If you're looking for a cost effective software I’d suggest this product. If you have worked with/used a more professional product or need a more professional/complex product, I would not recommend this one. If you want a straightforward and easy solution, PRTG Network Monitoring is one of the best.

I was not the decision maker so no comment.

If you're looking for "easy", "simple", and "user friendly", I would recommend this product.