PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We are a service provider in the IT industry, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We are using this product ourselves, and we have several customers who are also using it.

It is basically used for monitoring alerts, such as memory from a server has gone down.

Network Discovery is a feature that our customers like a lot.

The ability to maintain the health of the network is very good.

The user interface is okay.

This is a very lightweight solution.

The technical support could respond a little bit quicker.

A better console would be an improvement.

I have been working with PRTG Network Monitor for approximately five years.

The stability is excellent.

The networks in Guatemala are not very large, so scalability has not been an issue for us.

Our clients are typically medium-sized businesses.

We are working towards increasing the number of deployments.

I would rate the technical support and eight out of ten. They could be a little better in terms of response speed. Usually, they respond the next day.

The initial setup is straightforward and very simple. The length of time required for deployment depends on the size of the network but usually, we're talking about two hours.

We provide technical support to our customers who are using this product.

On average, two people are required for deployment and maintenance.

The pricing is okay and it is cheaper than some competing products.

The other product that our customers normally consider is SolarWinds.

SolarWinds is a more robust solution, and as such, it is much more expensive than PRTG. Most of the time, based on budget, our customers choose PRTG.

For me, this is a nice solution and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use PRTG Network Monitor for connectivity and communication between devices.

The most valuable feature of this solution is being able to see things graphically.

I would like to see more updates available in this solution.

I have been working with PRTG Network Monitor for five months.

We are using the latest version. We just run the updates.

It's updated often. 

I have not had the need to contact technical support.

We are also using Zabbix.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It requires you to enter the IP addresses of what you want to monitor.

The price is pretty comparable.

To others who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend it, it's a decent product.

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

We use the solution to recollect data from past equipment.

The solution's most valuable aspect is its ability to make reports. We appreciate that in the tool. It could be to relay corrupt data information, and we tell ourselves that it's gone, however, tools for that are expensive in terms of the labor. To perform your analyses with this solution is easier. We can recover past data and make analysis effectively.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The option to perform cross-correlated information about the server, I think could be better. This tool doesn't have this.

The ability to get another license if you need another tool, or to license specific aspects that may not be covered under your existing license could be better. Right now, it's not easy to switch contracts. The licensing policy needs more flexibility.

There may be some scalability issues.

We've used the solution for several years at this point. It's been a while. It's been as much as perhaps nine or ten years now.

The stability is there when you implement this generic service. We had to migrate in a bad scenario, due to the fact that we suffered from several issues. I still implemented it in one server to collect all the information. The product worked well and maintained its stability in general.

While I've never tried to scale the solution, the potential to scale looks fine. It's pretty dated, however, and I'm personally looking for another solution for that aspect.

We have about 20 people using the solution currently.

We're actually in the process of looking for another tool that would be able to collect information for us. I'm not sure if we'd increase the usage of this tool for that purpose.

I've never dealt with technical support. We have an IT team that deals with issues and any problems are typically handled internally. I wouldn't be able to comment on their knowledgeability or responsiveness due to my lack of experience dealing with them.

I don't recall using a different solution in the past.

The initial setup isn't overly complex. It's straightforward.

The deployment took about three weeks across ten servers.

We handled the implementation ourselves in-house. We didn't need any consultants or integrators to assist us.

I don't deal with the licensing or billing aspect of the solution and therefore can't speak to the exact costs of the product.

We might be considering looking into other solutions in the future.

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

This solution's deployment is in the server through our machine. We have maybe eight or ten data machines with it.

I'd recommend this solution for larger implementations.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are primarily using this product for alerting. We receive notifications for events like the interface going up or down and remote access, as well as information such as the interface volume.

We're using the basics of it to monitor our switches and routers and primarily just the networking equipment for up-down status.

This solution makes it easy to group devices. It is easy when it comes to dependencies of devices, so if your router goes down, the three or four switches behind it will automatically be paused so that you don't get multiple alerts.

The maneuverability within it is fairly intuitive, especially once you get used to it.

I would like to see them take their graphing tools and convert them into a collector so that we can point telemetry to them. This is a general comment about all of the network monitoring equipment and I think that it would make the product more valuable in the long run. As it is now, you have to point telemetry at Kibana or another open-source solution and then graph out of that. I don't see the point of that, given that I've got SolarWinds and the choice of other network monitoring software. However, none of them allow you to use it as a collector for telemetry, so the stream is part of the switch.

I posed this question to PRTG and they were unresponsive, so it seems like not enough customers are complaining about it or would be potentially using it. But that's where I think in the long term, it would be of benefit. Licensing becomes an issue, and I understand that, but I think that if they could allow a collector of telemetry and re-displaying that graphically, it would be the next best thing.

If you don't have something that is doing the SNMP manipulation then it is a bit clunky, although they have good documentation on it. You can add as many SNMP MIBs as you want to, and it's just a matter of processing them into their format.

We have been using the PRTG Network Monitor for between three and four years.

This is a fairly stable product and we don't have to do a lot of maintenance. They do come out with patches and we're applying them. We do have to occasionally reboot it, although I'm thinking it's not nearly as buggy as SolarWinds. In this version of PRTG, I don't have any issues that I'm aware of.

Scalability is not bad and you can add extra to it. We don't have a scaling issue right now but from what I can tell, it appears that it can scale well.

We have used SolarWinds products and currently use them for backup. We have problems with stability and we fix them by rebooting the device. PRTG seems to be more stable, in general.

One of my senior engineers performed the initial setup. I am doing the maintenance on it along with my engineer. Applying patches if required is not something that we've had an issue with.

It's an annual license that is based on the number of endpoints that we're tracking and using.

We have created several maps for this product, and there is at least one map that people specifically use. It is put up on our wall for the helpdesk, and it has all of the switches and routers in a pie so that you can see what's down and what's up. It is a nice red, green, and blue color coordination. This is displayed along with the utilization of firewalls and our egress points, and some other critical points in the network for the service desk to look at. If they get several calls from a site and they can look up at the map and see that there is a bunch of red, possibly recognizing a network issue, then it is helpful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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. 

I look after the infrastructure side of Lookers. We have 8000 users, 400 various servers, and 190 sites. We've been rolling the product out and are relying on the infrastructure purely for the whole of our business.

We've managed to cut down on our P1 escalations by around about 70 percent. We have 24/7 monitoring and the notifications are great.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. We tend to keep about 100 days worth of logs. Therefore, we can create patterns in terms of load against different times, and downtime, as well. When housekeeping jobs are run, then we get periods where resources are tested and high. So, it's a case for us we're able to use scalability, across Azure and AWS for Elastic. Thus, it's helped us in terms of planning our actual infrastructure against performance and things.

This solution provide us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure for management reporting. Stats-wise, we're able to get reporting out-of-the-box from PRTG. For our executive board, we're able to provide valid stats of what we are saving in terms of revenue in regards to the infrastructure of our business.

It is a central solution in terms of how to actually use it. It has a very easy dashboard. Everything is concise. We are able to create custom sensors. For different parts of the business, we have many products across many environments, and it works for everything.

It is very broad in regards to what it can actually cover. We look after corporate environments for websites and SQL Server, and it's just a one stop solution for us. It also works well out-of-the-box.

The remote probes are great because they lessen the load across to the main server. The probes work really well, and we have probably about 15 of them now across all our environments, which definitely increases performance.

Sensors are out-of-the-box and provide some good coverage, but we have a lot of custom sensors, as well. With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied.

Less than one year.

The solution is very stable. We get monthly patches which are released by Paessler. We actually have a change window where we put those in place. We have around 98 percent uptime. Whenever we've had any downtime, it's usually our own infrastructure which causes it.

We have a clustered environment using sort of a DR scenario across our data centers in Manchester and Belfast. So, when one is down, the other up.

At the moment, we have a limit of 10,000 sensors. That is the supported level, in terms of the license that we have. While we can increase that, it's at our own risk. After that, the product is not supported in terms of the extra sensors that we put in. Therefore, it is a case of how we use the actual load on the software ourselves.

So, we have the maximum license of 10,000 sensors, but we could do more.

10,000 sensors can be exceeded but it is not best practice. 

The technical support has been very good. Initially, when we did the setup, we called on support quite a bit. With NetFlow, which is the firewall monitoring, there was a lot to get into place and getting it visible within PRTG, but the support was a great help.

We used a product called SolarWinds in the past, and its cost was high. Whereas, PRTG came in at a third of SolarWind's cost. 

SolarWinds was limited in terms of its support, as it was agent-driven, so each device had to have an agent installed. Whereas, with PRTG, it just listens via SNMP; nothing needs to be installed on the product. This was a big thing for us in terms of supporting and maintaining it.

We used to have a lot of downtime and have definitely been able to improve that.

Because we had no training, there was a sort of a steep learning curve, but we managed to get through it.

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

We did the deployment in-house.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. For on call call outs, it helps with downtime, primarily. We're a retail business, so time is cost for us, and downtime is lost revenue. So we've able to reduce the amount of downtime that we used to have. We cover over 190 car dealerships around the country, and if an email goes down or the Internet goes down, we're able to combat that now ahead of time.

Cost was a factor when selecting this solution, but it just did everything we wanted it to do. The key thing was having it agentless, so we didn't have to maintain the local nodes.

Our licensing costs are 10,000 euros over three years. We've a three year contract with that, then we will just maintain it on a yearly basis.

SolarWinds was something that we re-evaluated. We were also using ManageEngine and Zabbix.

I came on board when we were downloading an evaluation of the actual software. We were doing our due diligence across other platforms/software, and PRTG came out top. 

Part of the pilot phase was to see how much load it would have on our network, and if there would be any sort of bottlenecks. We have been pretty happy with it. It has not had any sort of flow back on us, as a business.

It is a one stop solution for us. It covers all aspects of the business that we need for principal monitoring. Obviously, depending on the organization, it won't work for everyone. Some companies may have more locked down network rules. For companies like ours, in terms of a one stop solution across all of the environments, I would definitely recommend it.

The desktop app is something that is not been used that much because we tend to use the web UI. As the main infrastructure team, we do use the desktop, but we prefer the web UI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.