PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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.

We use it to monitor our servers. We try to monitor all of the functions the servers as closely as possible.

The historical data provided by the solution allows us to look back in time and look at the baseline performance of the sensors. We can compare them over time to see if anything has gotten worse or improved. The data helps us optimize network performance.

It allows us to be more proactive when monitoring our infrastructure. With PRTG, we normally know of issues with our servers before anybody reports them. We used to be very reactive, but now we are alerted instantly. We've got hundreds of servers, so it's impossible to monitor them manually.

It definitely enables our IT department to be more cost-effective because we don't waste time checking things manually, which can be quite time-consuming. It frees us up to concentrate on the issues that we've been alerted to through PRTG.

The solution also provides us with defined measures of performance so we can see whether it has improved or decreased over time. We can then improve our infrastructure. We can measure that using PRTG.

Some of the valuable features include the following.

• Ease of use. The authentication links into our standard Active Directory authentication, which is very good.
• It's got a wide variety of sensors that can be applied to many different aspects of the service to monitor them. There's a very good selection.
• The remote probes are very useful. They allow us to provide a reference across different areas in the network. In trying to localize issues, that's very useful.
• It's web-based, which is a big advantage when you can access it from anywhere. 
• It's very reliable.
• It's independent of other equipment, so it's not going to fail due to anything else failing in the infrastructure.
• It's got apps as well, so it's accessible, even on your mobile.

It's an excellent product. In terms of the overall feature set, it has a lot of features. It can monitor a wide range of aspects of our equipment and it has a lot of options for alerting.

It's very good for monitoring our internal infrastructure, but we're using more cloud services now. It would be useful to be able to get information back from these cloud services in detail, and display any issues within PRTG for the rest of our systems.

It's very stable. It has to be when it's monitoring for failures in other parts of the system. We've had very few issues with stability. It's been very good.

It allows us to easily increase the number of sensors and the scope of what we can monitor. The scalability is very good. It grows with our business. We initially bought a set number of licenses and then upgraded it and bought additional server licenses to monitor other things in the business.

We haven't had to resort to contacting tech support much over the years that we've been using it. When we have, they've always responded quickly and been very good at helping to resolve any issues.

We didn't have a previous solution in place. 

It was very easy to set up a trial version of the server and evaluate it for a period to see what we could get out of the product.

The time from setup of the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure was quite quick. Before the trial was over, we already had a lot more information than we had had before. It was worth definitely the cost of licensing it and paying for it.

We did it ourselves. It was so easy.

I'm not involved in the commercial aspect of the solution, but the pricing is very low compared to other solutions.

We evaluated a number of different server monitoring solutions and selected PRTG as the best solution to go forward with. We looked at WhatsUp Gold and Nagios. PRTG was much easier to use, configure, set up, and get running. It provided better information which was very well displayed.

We also had downtime previously. That was definitely why we went ahead with a monitoring solution, so we could be alerted quickly to any issues and resolve them before they affected our service and users.

I would recommend trying PRTG and seeing the benefits.

We don't tend to use the Desktop app because the web-based interface is so good. I really don't have a lot of experience with the Desktop app.

I would say the product is a nine out of ten. It's been very successful and done exactly what we wanted it to do.

Our primary use case is network performance monitoring, but we also use it for things like network traffic flows and getting a better idea of the actual types of traffic that are going through our network.

We've used the historical data quite a bit. It has fed into our DR process, which was not a main use case but has been quite handy.

We've got monitoring on a number of our key apps. The alerting comes from PRTG and goes into the Slack channels of the development team. That is all segregated away from the operations team, so the alerting goes to the people in the format that they like most of all. That has really helped the turnaround and issue identification.

The solution has also enabled us to consolidate and be more cost-effective as an IT department. About two or three years ago we had two or three legacy apps in place and we've been able to consolidate that into one. It has definitely been a cost-saver.

Finally, while we hadn't necessarily experienced downtime, we were having issues with stability in the network. Some of the output from PRTG helped to narrow down where those issues were coming from, so it gave us a much clearer idea of where we need to go.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard interface. It's very clean, it's very simple to use.

The alerting is also excellent, it's just what you need. It's not too fussy, it's not too difficult to set up, and from an operational perspective, the feedback that I get from the guys is always excellent.

The overall feature set is good. We're probably not doing it justice. It has an awful lot of integrations which we're just not using at the moment. It's very vendor neutral, very vendor agnostic. I wish we could be using it more, to be honest with you. At the moment we've got an on-premise solution. We're looking to move to the cloud, but we haven't actually explored that with the vendor yet.

We've got a few sensors deployed in the network but not too many. We've had some issues previously with the performance of the sensors. We tend to deploy quite a bit of WMI, which is quite processor-intensive, and we've found that that impacts the sensors quite a bit. We've had to tune that down a little bit over time. That is something that we've spoken to the vendor about and we've been able to work through those issues.

Our experience with the remote probes has been similar. At scale, we've found that they can struggle sometimes, but that depends on the type of query that you're throwing at it. That's probably more a limitation of the query itself than the software.

In terms of additional features, we are potentially exploring things like containerization and I'm not really what sure the ability of the software is around that.

The reports I've had from the team on its stability are all good. It seems to get patched on a very regular basis. There are constant updates. We haven't any problems, we haven't had any downtime yet, and we've been running it for 18 to 24 months now. It's excellent.

We've had some issues with the sensors and remote probes. We're a relatively small environment, but we've started to see limitations based on the actual type of queries that we're throwing at it. We've been able to work around that and the support from vendor has been excellent in that respect.

The technical support has been excellent. We've predominantly raised support tickets but we've also gone through our account manager, and a couple of issues that we've had have been escalated.

We had two or three solutions and we wanted to consolidate. One of them was SolarWinds ipMonitor, but I can't remember what the development one was now. They were going end-of-life and we wanted to consolidate, we wanted a single platform that we could work with. In terms of the feature set, PRTG seemed to cover all the bases.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We took quite a phased approach so we were probably rolling it out over the space of six months. We took our time with it. The experience that we had was good.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure was within the space of a month or two. That was mainly due to the pace at which we rolled it out. We started to get some good feedback quite early on, during the first week or so, but overall the time it took was due to the speed of our implementation.

We went directly through the vendor, and we deployed in-house.

It has definitely provided us value. It's just that we haven't necessarily measured that value.

We've got the unlimited package. I don't know the licensing situation today, but I believe it was around the £15,000 per year mark. It's probably about a couple of grand per month, at most.

We had a look at SolarWinds, their network monitoring suite, which was the big player in the market. It's got a price tag to match and that was certainly a factor. Admittedly, it is a much bigger product, it's got broad capabilities and it's got different kinds of integrations. For what we needed at that time, PRTG absolutely suited.

Scrub out your requirements. PRTG does the network side very well indeed. If asset monitoring and integrations with other products are really important for you then it might be worth looking at this as well as a secondary product. Also, you need to plan your deployment and understand where and how to deploy the remote sensors.

I prefer the web client. I've had limited use of the Desktop app and, from what I've seen, it's good, but I find using the web app is a lot cleaner in my workspace.

The product has to be about a nine out of ten. From my somewhat more high-level view, the summary dashboards are excellent, they give me what I need. Having spoken to the operations guys, it gives them everything they need. It's quite a simple interface, it's very expandable, and has allowed us to get control of it in a single console. That is really what we need for a small team.

We use it for network monitoring, mostly. We look at any metrics that the sensors pull back for us, such as availability, performance. We have some custom sensors for service monitoring.

The solution's historical data helps us optimize network performance. We can find issues by looking at historical data and benchmark it against what it should be.

It's given us metrics which we can then pass on to customers, availability statistics and things like that. It's really added value to the services we provide. From that point of view, it has definitely improved things.

It makes our IT department more cost-effective because we can detect failures faster, we can do something about them. We can get early warnings on things that are going to go wrong, be proactive about dealing with them, and have less downtime.

It gives us the needed feedback on our IT infrastructure, such as utilization of disks on a server. We get that information back and are able to act on it.

One of the valuable features is the diversity of metrics available to us to monitor. It's all there, it's all in the box. It's all made very easy, by virtue of it being pre-configured. You point it at the box, pull your credentials in if you need to, and off it goes and does it. A lot of solutions do that, but this just has it all in one box, which is what makes it really good.

The solution’s sensors and remote probes are great, spot on. They keep improving them. It's only a problem from time to time when old sensors get deprecated and you have to replace them with a new one, but other than that it's a very good selection.

The overall feature set is good. It's diverse, it's all there.

I don't think the Desktop app is that great. I don't like it. I would like to see cross-compatibility on different platforms. Also, the window management isn't that great, and the refresh rates aren't that great.

Their roadmap is good and the features that they're releasing are good, but our main ask is around the scalability issue that I've mentioned elsewhere in this review.

If you have enough resources the stability is fine, fairly rock-solid. We're at double the recommended capacity in terms of sensors for our instance, and it's running fine.

Scalability is the only major sticking point for me. There is a recommended number of sensors, which is around 10,000, and we're double that. We're not comfortable putting any more than that, even though the server might be able to handle it. It's already well outside the support boundaries for the solution. 

The only option we have to scale is to buy another core, which would be a separate, stand-alone instance, would not be managed through the same interface, and we would have to be looking in two different places. We love the product, but at the moment that is the main sticking point for us.

There have been no real problems with tech support. We don't really need to go to them, the product takes care of itself. When we have needed them, they have been very responsive and gotten back to us quickly.

We did have system downtown before implementing the solution, but it didn't really influence our decision to get PRTG. We needed a monitoring system anyway, by virtue of the nature of our business.

We would have been using an open-source solution before PRTG but we needed a more feature-rich product to work with, given the number of solutions we were operating.

The initial setup was very easy. There's nothing much to do, honestly. You just install the software on the core server and then you can install remote probes in any private sub-nets that you need and they will speak back to the core. It's very straightforward.

Within about a half an hour of installing it, we had information back.

We did it ourselves.

Subjectively, it probably has saved our organization money, but it would be difficult to quantify it.

We pay for a perpetual license and we have a support fee.

We've had PRTG in place for a number of years, so what we evaluated was in the early days, a lot of open-source solutions: Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti, etc. PRTG is differentiated because it caters to all platforms and endpoints, has features for Windows, and WMI sensors which aren't necessarily available out-of-the-box in the other solutions. That would have been a determining factor.

It will do the job, more than anything I can think of. It will give you really useful monitoring statistics out-of-the-box, and will give you the ability to customize and do things that aren't there by default. It will take care of all your monitoring needs, pretty much, but just be conscious of scale.

I would say PRTG is an eight out of ten. We're very happy with the functionality. Those missing two points come from the scalability issues.

We primarily monitor Windows-based servers and services running within them. We also have some ties-in scripting into more bespoke areas, as well on our network.

We host a virtual environment running VMware in-house.

The historical data is used for looking at trends: Where we are versus where we were and whether or not additional loads may be our system. We are able to see this over a period of time, looking back historically.

The solution provides us with needed the feedback on our IT infrastructure. We use 12 monitoring servers, which we use to monitor our wide area network and router switches, so we do monitor bandwidth. From a network point of view, we can see the state of the network, as well as bandwidth usage and downtime.

The immediacy of the alerting is the most valuable feature. My role is to keep our network up and running. We have a dashboard in the office and are able to see things almost in real-time, within a minute or two. This is the greatest benefit.

The scripting element allows the bespoke option, so I am not just tied in to what is provided out-of-the-box. We have created a few bespoke scripts, e.g., we have tied it into our phone system to do various things, like monitor SIP trunks. 

The product is flexible, and we can move outside the predefined probes. Although to be fair, there are quite a lot of those to choose from anyway. The out-of-the-box probes generally suit us fine.

There are so many out-of-the-box features to look at that there are very few things that we have had to write bespoke scripts for. We don't have a particularly diverse environment to monitor, since it is all very box bound, Microsoft products, and relatively new.

Although they are fairly comprehensive with what you can do with them, the mapping and dashboards are a bit clunky to set up. I would like a more straightforward ability to create dashboards and maps. The network maps should be a bit more flexibility in the GUI to do what we need to do.

I don't have an issue with the stability of the monitoring probes and the basic server. 

We have had a few issues with the web elements, as far as the dashboard. With the dashboard, it has to be manually refreshed. Occasionally, we reboot the server, or at least web services, due to the web aspect. However, these don't affect the underlining monitoring.

We have started out with a 1000 probes. We're currently running, or have licenses for about 2500, running about 2000 individual probes on the system. It is showing a strain on the server. We are running on a Windows VM at the moment. We have somewhere in the region of 64GB and 4 Core running it. It is an okay server, but it is showing signs of a bit of a slow down, needing patches, updates, and reboots. It does take a while to come back to life.

We have added more probes to the solution. From the monitoring side, it is fine. However, using the server and rebooting, it is showing its age, especially if I have to restart services. Whether or not it is the application or the hardware that it is running on. 

It is doing the job for us and has scaled up from where it was originally.

If you are a small company with a few servers, the product is overkill. For a larger enterprise (like us), we have around a 120 Windows servers in our environment, and it seems absolutely fine. If you're a small company, you probably want more simple, straightforward products, as you don't need the features.

I haven't had that much reason to go to them. 

A colleague of mine primarily does the updates and patching version updates. We have had a couple of issues with incompatibility after the updates. Then, we have had cause to use the tech support. The issues aren't outstanding for too long.

Prior to implementing this, we had some very basic home written ways of determining things, like remaining space on disk. It was very fundamental and wasn't fit for the purpose. It was for when the business had half-dozen servers, and as we grew, it wasn't. We knew we needed something, so we looked around, settling on PRTG.

There wasn't an incident that lead us to implement the PRTG Network Monitor solution. Obviously, all systems will have issues now and then. We knew we had to put something in place, but there wasn't a specific incident or instance that drove us in this product's direction.

The solution provides us response times to issues, since we didn't have any of this type monitoring prior to putting PRTG in. The product has created a more robust environment. As an infrastructure manager, I am less at the mercy of staff members who are trying to find and work things out more quickly. There are just provided for me.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, as there were a lot of basic elements out-of-the-box.

As soon as any probes are in place, there is feedback straightaway from the system.

We purchased it through our reseller and implemented it ourselves.

It does help the IT department prevent or mitigate downtime. It allows us to pick things up which might not have been picked up that would have caused downtime. While there is a cost saving, it's rather intangible and difficult to state.

We are licensed for 2500 endpoints.

I don't have any comparison with direct competitors. We have been using PRTG for the better part of possibly ten years now. We haven't found the feature set lacking. Everything that we have tried to do, we have managed to work with PRTG to do it.

I would be happy to recommend PRTG. I have no qualms with it whatsoever. 

It does what we need it to do and is flexible. There are some areas, like setting up dashboards, which could be improved upon. However, I have no major problems with the solution and no concerns with renewing next time around.

I find the functionality within the web interface very feature-rich (compared to other products), so I have very few reasons to use the desktop app.

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.