PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We use it to monitor our network because we have a central site that connects to many remote sites, and we have primary and alternative links. We need to monitor both links for each site to be able to react when it is necessary in case of failure. It is beneficial for us to check the connectivity and bandwidth used in a particular channel.

There are good tools for monitoring purposes. 

There are some restrictions for usage and sales that need to be ironed out for the country of Congo. I would like the ability to monitor Cisco IRS devices.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for the past twenty-two years.

PRTG Network Monitor is a very stable product.

PRTG Network Monitor is a scalable product even though there are currently restrictions in our country.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to deploy.

We deployed PRTG Network Monitor through our own in-house team.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of ten.

We use PRTG Network Monitor for network monitoring. We mainly monitor uptime on our switches and our network environment, and we're looking at expanding into server monitoring as well.

The Slack integration is fantastic, and I've actually found it to be very useful recently.

Integration into service management ticketing systems could be better. They should simplify the integration into big service management platforms like ServiceNow, Remedy, and Cherwell. 

They're really into monitoring, but they don't do any self-resolution. It would be better if the company moved more into the AIOps space so that you could actually kick off some remedies. I know that you can execute some commands from the tool, but you need to develop those all yourself. It would be really handy if they had some auto-remedy scripts that they could develop on top.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for nearly ten years.

PRTG Network Monitor is very stable. 

PRTG Network Monitor is very easy to scale.

The technical support was really good because I did get answers for what I was trying to do. They're very good.

When we first built it, it was very simple, but we completely rebuilt our PRTG about four years ago with the help of an external partner. It took us about one or two months to deploy this solution.

We don't perform any maintenance as such. Just every now and then, we update to the latest version to keep it fresh. We're always interested in making sure that our environment is as secure as possible. That's why we always put in the latest code.

We implemented this solution with the help of an external partner. Our experience with the external partner was good.

The price is actually on the cheaper side. If you're going with the unlimited license code, it's very cheap compared to competitors unless you're going for something free, like Zabbix. But you get what you pay for, and it doesn't have the full suite of products or tools like SolarWinds or a ScienceLogic.

If someone were looking for a basic monitoring tool for servers and networks, I would recommend PRTG Network Monitor. If they're looking at the whole stack and potentially integrating with an ITSM platform or looking at it for something like CMDB correction as well, there are other tools that I would actually recommend. I would recommend something like ScienceLogic if they were looking for full-stack integration with ITSM, CMDB, monitoring, and auto resolution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give PRTG Network Monitor an eight.

Our primary use case with PRTG is measuring and monitoring the system. We have a few servers running in redundancy. There are two monitoring ones. One for the maintenance staff with more details and the other one is for general control and assessing when there is a user error or 401. We use it on the business logic level. With redundancy, the FRC is just to monitor whether there is a complete down or only one system goes down.

We see everything being monitored on the screen. When we do mapping it's easier for us to monitor whether it's the server's fault, the feature's fault, or it's the router, or some other device, or some other legacy system. It all starts with the monitoring.

The feature I like is that it can easily do a lot of mapping. 

I can easily access the maintenance map and the four control maps. By looking at it I can roughly know why the system is behaving as it is, and I can click to the second or third layer to identify the fault. I also like the 365 days statistical graph. These are very helpful for me to analyze the flow and to record the trends.

Because our system doesn't connect to the internet, it wants us to put in the license and then the activation should occur. Sometimes we do the activation when we are passed date. When we try to activate the license past date, it's not as easy as we thought it should be. In other words, they could improve the process of updating the license.

If I do it correctly before the activation expires, it should be okay. But if I try after the due date has passed then you can't get the correct security patch.

I would prefer if PRTG could work in redundancy mode with an external database rather than how it is now with the database inside PRTG, where I can access it only through the report. If you have an external database you can do another trace on the data with the redundancy while the monitoring system is still going on.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for almost two years.

So far there are no issues with the stability. The only setback is that I don't know why there's only one PRTG running the system. If one fails then redundancy is not there.

PRTG is quite easy to use as long you have the hang of it. The only problem are the legacy systems that don't have direct connection.

The issues to pay attention to in terms of scalability are the sensors. The sensors help you isolate your problem. Let's say my only problem now is field monitoring. I might also want to have central monitoring but I couldn't do it. If you have a field monitoring system you may also want to have a central monitor as well. I haven't tried to do that yet on PRTG because I need higher levels to monitor my three or four PRTG systems. In other words, the product is not so easy to scale.

Right now it is just me and my colleague working on this product. We use it on a daily basis. We have groups for the maintenance center and the reporting center. Both are monitoring and mapping. I configured this for them.

The support is fantastic. Because of our time difference I get my message replied to by the next morning. It's quite fast.

My client is asking me to look into Icinga. Icinga is still new to me and I'm not yet sure about it. I think it's a Nagios software. I did use Nagios before, but I didn't configure it, it was part of the system delivery.

With Nagios, I can't see the graph, or the trends, or the mapping of an individual site. I'm not really sure about Nagios.

When I joined the company PRTG was already setup. They subsequently added more servers, so I got to learn it through my colleagues.

In the beginning, I downloaded PRTG for free and did my own experiments. I would advise others to do that, too. Download it and try it out. When you do that you'll see where the limitations are.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate PRTG Network Monitor about an eight. I still think there's room for improvement, especially when it comes to updating the event configuration.

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 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.

PRTG is a very versatile and flexible tool. We have a vast number of users spread over more than 300 installations in India and neighboring countries. We have many different types of customers who use this tool for project control monitoring and other types of network monitoring.

PRTG Enterprise Monitor comes with built-in analytics capability. This means that if there is an incident, it not only tells you that there is an incident, it will also tell you the root cause.  For large networks, this is beneficial as the network team can easily home onto the problem directly without spending time searching for the root cause, which allows them to attend to the problem as the alerts come in. 

Having an Alliance program is very valuable. The Paessler Uptime Alliance Program focuses on making the core network product, which is PRTG, progressively better. It also combines capabilities from any partners in the ecosystem. For example, we have UVexplorer (a US-based company), taking care of network discovery, network topology mapping, and network asset mapping and we have other partners, like CORP-IT, that provide us with the plug-in to monitor SAP and sensors. In other words, it's an ever-expanding network management system.

If you can get everything into a particular environment, you can monitor your factory automation systems; however, they also need to be monitored for maintenance purposes. If you intend to automate factory information, you cannot afford to fail. Monitoring the equipment and receiving dashboard alerts for maintenance is highly advantageous. This is a great feature of PRTG. Currently, we are competing in the market with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. They are good, but we come out winning.

From a security perspective, PRTG provides you complete Secure Socket Layer-based access. If you're monitoring your network or a private network using a BLS cloud, security is automatically ensured because of the way you're deployed.

I don't believe there is much need for improvement. The product is constantly improving. I used to think that the reporting could be quicker, but presently, there is a solution for that, thanks to the SLA plug-in from CORP-IT. The basic reason why PRTG reportings were slow is due to the fact that the reporting engine is built-in as a functionality in the PRTG application. The application does a lot of things, like monitoring and managing the database and it updates your dashboard in real-time.

The last priority goes to the reports. Typically, reporting can wait if there are demands on other aspects of the product, but because of this, the reporting was becoming too slow because it was always the last priority. I used to think that needed to be improved but the formal plug-in has solved this issue. Some customers don't mind the slow reporting, as not everything is urgent. However, if you want faster reporting, the options are available. 

Maybe in the future there will be room for improvement, but currently, there is nothing pressing that I can think of. 

I have been using this solution since 2003. Previously, I used CA, IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, and HP OpenView. 

I have not come across any situation which was so bad that PRTG has crashed.  

The stability and security of this solution are intertwined. PRTG is not static, it's always evolving and updating. Basically, the security situation at any given time makes PRTG's functionality vulnerable. Thankfully, they take this as a top priority, providing new solutions all the time. Paessler releases 7 to 8 updates a year to combat this issue. Because of this, I would say we're in lockstep with our security needs which also tie into the stability of the solution.

Presently, PRTG is extremely scalable. In fact, I would boldly say that this is the most scalable network monitoring tool that I know of. 

If you have PRTG on a single server, the server can perform many functions. PRTG has a local probe that probes according to the configuration settings; however, even the best servers cannot take on an infinite load. Thankfully, PRTG offers a remote probe as part of their license return. This has multiple advantages including lessening the load of the server.
For example, should the communication link between the remote probe and PRTG server break down, the local probe will keep on accumulating data locally. When the link to the server is established, all the collected data is then flushed into the core. That is one way of scaling, but keep in mind, that adding multiple remote probes will eventually saturate the core because now you have to manage the data from so many sensors.

 Depending on the types of sensors and monitoring frequency, as your network expands, you can keep adding PRTG digit codes. You can keep adding servers and sensors to focus on monitoring. In my opinion, I don't know of another product where you can do this. Even if you've applied PRTG on multiple servers, you can still manage all of them using a single dashboard.

The initial setup was very easy. What you pay for this product encompasses everything. When we sell this product to a customer, we say "You can do it yourself, you don't need to pay for installation". So far, at least 70% of our customers are able to manage and there are some that don't need our help at all; however, there are occasionally a few customers who email or call us looking for support, in which case, we are always quick to help at no charge. This is all included in the price you pay for this solution. There are no hidden costs and the customers appreciate this.

Downloading and installation take less than five minutes, but after downloading, there is configuration to be done. Installing the software is only one part, about 30 to 35% of the whole picture. Our networking team needs to be organized because this is how we guide our customers in the right direction before the product arrives, which saves them a lot of time. We have a network team, server team, and a storage team. They are very structured and know how to do their job well — they can install some of the largest networks in just three to four hours. In the best-case scenario, it would take them less than a week to install PRTG Excel.

We encourage our customers to use the trial version first, to build a rating. By doing so, when they are ready to purchase the full commercial license, they will be ready to be productive from day one. 

PRTG is now available as PRTG Enterprise Monitor, and the price of it varies depending on the total number of sensors the customer buys. 

PRTG is available as a service network monitoring service in the cloud, with the option of purchasing up to 1000 sensors. For small companies, it's more of a network tool because smaller organizations like to focus on their code builders. Smaller companies cannot afford or attract very technical people to monitor the network with cloud hosting. PRTG can fix that, but it's only good for small workloads.

The process of network management itself has to be organized. You have to organize yourselves in terms of how your network is structured: how do you want to monitor and manage it? Even that has to be organized as well. For example, if there is a problem with the database, PRTG should be able to alert the data administrators, not anybody else. Only they should take care of any pressing issues; if they don't, the method will go to the wrong person, which can be very damaging. There is a lot of human organization required in administering a method between technologies and that needs to be organized well for the network monitoring process to be effective.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine because everything has room for improvement. 

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 features which I believe to be the most valuable for PRTG are its easy setup in general, including its alarm setup; along with its out-of-the-box monitoring checks.

The fact that it's simple to use network-based monitoring, and at the same time is reliable and robust.

This product in particular provided network traffic control, net SLA measurements which are always quite practical. Also, it allowed us to report downtime on sites in a very easy and comprehensive way.

Its most important quality, in my opinion, is that it's an out-of-the-box functional product. This means you won't need a lot of technical know-how to properly make it function, at least on a basic level. It's easy to configure and make an operator know how to interpret the information gathered and apply the information it reports.

They could improve on application monitoring, user defined OS sensors, its lack of agent defined monitoring. Also, they could include customized reports and network maps, more detailed SLA reports, better item relations. Lastly, they should improve on distributed monitoring for customers on remote networks.

What it offers is far from being enough. It's dashboards, GUI and reports are too simple for cases where you'd need advanced monitoring tools.

I've used it on two different sites for over three years.

None at all, I'd even say that it's the best thing about this program: you don't need to know about monitoring to make it run.

We've had no issues with the stability.

It does consume a lot of hardware resources, and over time you can notice it going slower. This is especially so when you've added/erased a large amount of checks, alerts or customizations from what are called "sensors" . Just like many Windows-oriented tools, you sometimes feel the urge of just resetting everything and starting over -but that's mainly because of how it handles during daily tasks- usually it doesn't have major issues with bugs or general usefulness.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I've worked with a large variety of solutions, mainly Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti and Pandora FMS. In this case I resorted to PRTG because the client already had a license for it. One of the times I had to set it up from scratch and the other time I had to take over an installation which was already functioning.

It was quite simple although, as always, you have to get used to the terminology used which is unofficial.

In both cases I had an In-house team.

It was quite good, considering the product is inexpensive for commercial standards and that it won't take a long time to learn to use properly.

It's a good product for simple environments, but its price/feature ratio scales rapidly in larger environments. In really complex or large environments, this product just isn't enough, it's lacking a lot of features that would otherwise be necessary for these types of environments.

generally work with open source solutions such as Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti or Pandora FMS. In this case it could be compared to WhatsApp Gold, but I think PRTG is more useful for compact and simple environments.

I would say that in general it's good software, yet I would advise newcomers about some of its limited features, but you can't really expect pinecones from a palm tree, if you know what I mean.

If you need a simple and solid tool, and you're willing to spend a buck, it's a good option to consider. It's a tool that's been tested and you can easily see what it is or is not meant for.