PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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.

We use PRTG to remotely check if devices are still online. It can also monitor temperature, traffic, and device connectivity. We configure it to send us alerts. For example, if a device exceeds a specified bandwidth, PRTG will send an email notification.

The email notifications are helpful, and the dashboards are user-friendly for people with little network monitoring knowledge. 

The icons on PRTG's network diagram are hard to find. For example, finding the icons for firewalls and servers is difficult, so we're struggling to create the network topology.

We have been using PRTG since the start of the pandemic. 

I rate PRTG nine out of 10 for stability. We haven't encountered any problems.

I rate PRTG 10 out of 10 for scalability if you have the budget to buy the license.

I rate PRTG support eight out of 10. They respond immediately. 

Positive

I did trials of SolarWinds and PRTG simultaneously and decided to go with PRTG because it's user-friendly and easier to understand. 

I rate PRTG six out of 10 for ease of setup from a beginner's perspective. Total deployment time was about a month because we had to do some studying and revisions. It was a continuous process because we would think about some improvements and apply them step by step. Two people were involved in the deployment: the network admin and our network security admin.

The full version of PRTG is a little costly, and the free version is limited to only 100 devices.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor eight out of 10. I would recommend it. 

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.

My primary use case for the PRTG solution is network device monitoring. For example, if one of my Ubiquity access points goes down, PRTG will send an alert so that I can go and try to restart it and bring it back up before people start complaining.

This product can be improved by updating the net flow interface. The one that is in place works – I can get all the information I need from it – but it is a little bit clunky.

I have not had any problems with the stability of this solution. I have to reboot it once a year, which is a chance for me to do the updates anyway.

The scalability of this solution has gone smoothly for me so far. I am mostly using it just for pings, and because I don't have a ton of net flows going into it, I am not heavily taxing it. We have a couple of thousand devices that it i monitoring and we have had no problems.

I never had a reason to be in touch with the tech support for the solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's an application that you can run on a Windows box. I have it running on a virtual Windows server, so it's not a standalone operating system, and it can come off as an application.

PRTG is relatively intuitive and fairly straightforward. It has net flow monitoring and that works all right. I would describe it as a decent middle-of-the-road solution. It costs about $500 a year, so if you're looking just to watch basic traffic and keep an eye on devices, it works fine.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitoring a seven out of ten.

We are using PRTG Network Monitor mainly for real-time monitoring and communication in our environment.

The most valuable feature of PRTG Network Monitor is real-time monitoring.

PRTG Network Monitor should improve the NetFlow dashboard, there is no flexibility, and the NetFlow is not meeting the business needs. Additionally, they are missing part of the configuration management.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for approximately six years.

PRTG Network Monitor is stable.

I did not face any issues with the scalability of PRTG Network Monitor. However, I did not test it.

There are approximately 17 administrators using this solution in my organization.

I have not needed to use the support from PRTG Network Monitor.

The initial setup of PRTG Network Monitor is simple. It took approximately 15 minutes to deploy.

We did the deployment of PRTG Network Monitor in-house.

There is a license to use PRTG Network Monitor and it is annually.

We have evaluated a lot of software and we found PRTG Network Monitor the best solution.

It's a good solution regarding real-time monitoring only, but for the site of the operation, you can't rely on it without any other solution to fit all use cases.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor a five out of ten.

We're using PRTG for network, asset, and infrastructure monitoring. I have five network and infrastructure engineers using the solution, and we're not using it extensively. It's one of our secondary monitoring tools.

PRTG gives us true visibility of the downtime of particular circuit functions. So if a circuit is up but not routing traffic, I will know with this tool. I can write a customized script for a sensor to detect specific things.

One useful feature is PRTG's scripting ability. We can go into the system and create monitoring sensors, for lack of a better phrase. So I can look for something specific instead of just uptime or downtime on a specific asset.

PRTG's documentation could be improved.

I've been using PRTG Network Monitor for about a year.

PRTG's stability is fine.

We're not that big of an organization, so I can't say much about scalability, but we've had no problems with it.

I've had no contact with PRTG support.

In the past, we used SolarWinds. We switched to PRTG because it was more scriptable and customizable.

Setting up PRTG was straightforward and took a few hours.

After the initial acquisition cost, the license is about four grand a year.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor seven out of 10. If you are considering PRTG, you should take into account the fact that the data is going up into the cloud in a private, isolated console or a tenant in a multi-tenant environment. Just be aware of what you want to look for and know how to get it in terms of status, uptime, etc.

We primarily use the solution for applicative monitoring, or network and applicative monitoring for some customers so that they can make sure that all equipment is up, and sometimes we use it to look for some more accurate sensors.

Ergonomy is very useful to us. It was really easy to use. It's not really a feature, however, ergonomy and the way I could very simply makeup, let's say, basic monitoring, and then go much deeper when there is a need is helpful. 

The alerts are very helpful to have access to. 

The possibility to make maps is very valuable.

The initial setup is very simple.

So far, we've found the solution to be quite stable.

I don't really have opinions on what types of features should be added. I haven't seen anything really lacking.

The possibility to export the part of the sensor we made would be helpful. For instance, if you're doing monitoring for customers and we want to share this with them or bring them an on-premises tool as well for them, you can't export just one part. You have got to rebuild everything. Just to remake it on another premise, you've got to rebuild it from scratch.

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

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

There are about 20 users handling this product.

We haven't really attempted to scale it in any way. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult the solution would be to expand.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We've been quite satisfied with the level of service we receive. We've found them to be very helpful and responsive when we have queries.

We are looking to take on other products. We are expanding, we are trying to share the two with other departments. As it often happens, the other departments say, "Well, why did you choose this and not something else?" And not
this or that?" Currently, we're looking into potential replacements.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not a complex process. A company shouldn't have too much trouble with the implementation process.

I can't say how long the deployment took. I can't recall the exact amount of time.

For maintenance, we update the solution regularly. That's handled internally by our team.

While the setup was handled internally, for the sensors, sometimes we had to reach out to the help desk for assistance. However, we did not use an integrator or consultant for the process.

I'm not an expert on pricing, however, I would describe the pricing as pretty cheap. It's not overly expensive.

I'm paying something like €1000 per year for the maintenance. I've got unlimited sensors.

Three years ago when we took PRTG, we had a trainee make a small inquiry and we concluded that regarding the needs we have today, PRTG was the best solution. We concluded at the time that it would be much easier to use. The technical gap between PRTG and the other solutions would not be relevant to how we planned to use it.

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

We're currently using the latest version of the solution.

Im not a network specialist, bu5 I would recommend PRTG. We've been extremely satisfied with its capabilities overall. I would rate it at a nine 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.