PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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. 

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.

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.

We use PRTG to monitor all of our business critical and distributed systems around the areas that we operate in the UK. This is ensure they have good system uptime and can demonstrate against SLAs.

The historical data provided by the solution is one of the main reasons why we went with PRTG. It gives you that granular view to be able to go back 24 hours, two days, a month, or year. You can start building powerful data patterns with this technology platform.

One of the things which became apparent was that we didn't know when things were going down out of hours unless somebody sat and was there watching the consoles. Nobody knew when things were going down. Now, one of the things that we've noticed is we are picking up when we are having out of hours outages. The solution is starting to correlate data so we can speak to the relative representatives and make sure the outages stop happening.

The solution provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It gives us really good quality of service when it comes to monitoring of available space and available resources. It allows us to preempt issues before they become a problem for the business.

It is easy to use and intuitive, which is really important. It does what it says on the box by giving you a visual of the state of what is going on at any one time. 

The feature set does what it says on the box. It does the monitoring well. It doesn't try to do anything which it is not supposed to. It does what it does well.

There is a good selection of sensors and probes in it.

While the web application side of things is fantastic, the desktop app is the one area where it do with some improvement. From a user's perspective, I would like to be able to get more out of the desktop offering as opposed to where we are now with it. It could be stronger. There are opportunities there that you don't have with the web-based application to do some interesting and innovative stuff.

An important thing is to keep up with the technology which is now coming out. There is obviously a lot of generic stuff in the solution, and there is also a lot of new tech which is coming out that people need to be able to monitor.

We have had no issues. It just works and is up 24/7/365. Every update which comes out is rock solid.

We are a fairly large implantation, as we have currently 2500 nodes. We are just about to double that. The solution allows you to keep on doubling and doubling, as much as you need. The only restriction is the platform that you put it on. When you get into those larger areas, from what I understand, the performance on PRTG is just as good as it is on the smaller implementations.

We have contacted their tech support a few times, which is really good. They got back to us very quickly with a good level of technical knowledge.

The previous solution that we had (SolarWinds) was giving us a lot of false positives. We were spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. We had used PRTG before, and it has always been a solid platform. 

We were experiencing network and system downtime before implementing PRTG. This was that a driving factor to switch solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. Within a half an hour, we had it set up and running. The setup is intuitive and the install is very much wizard-driven. There is no real agenda behind it. It is very much just click and go once you have finished your scanning, then it works straightaway.

It took two to three hours from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. It was very quick.

We used a reseller (Axis) for the deployment, and our experience with them was really good.

The solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. It cuts down on downtime. This means we are not chasing after things that we don't need to chase. It is bringing to our attention the operational problems that we have, so we can focus our attention on those, instead of running around trying to figure out what the problem is.

It is constantly ensuring our systems are up and running. They are in a solid position. If you look at the costs attributed to downtime, those have been removed.

It is about £4,500 for the first year, then about another 15 to 20 percent annually after that. So, we are looking at about £1000 running costs a year. When you think about how much an outage costs per minute, it's negligible.

We just considered PRTG when moving away from SolarWinds.

Look at what it is you want your organization to be able to do and what it is you need to monitor. Then, concentrate on the key elements first. Don't try and overcloud what you're trying to do. Start with your core stuff and work outwards, then you will always get a good solid solution.

It is a really good, solid product, which does exactly what we need it to do.

We use it to monitor our critical infrastructure, i.e., the services our users depend on. It is very useful for us to have that holistic view, e.g, one single view of the dashboards. The product is a useful kit to summarize the health of our infrastructure.

It has made us more proactive. Instead of waiting for the users to report failures to us, we can very quickly see things on a nice, easy dashboard and respond to it quickly enough. Then, hopefully, we can avoid having an issue experienced by the end user. 

We can use the data which comes out of PRTG to look at capacity and plan to grow particular areas of the business. It provides statistics about application or service, monitoring both of endpoints of that service. Therefore, we can look at the middle, and say, "How many people are actually using this?" We use the traffic statistics and other things from PRTG to help us predict growth and more.

The dashboarding is simple to use. We have one of the full dashboards, which is shaped like a donut. We call it the donut doom. If we ever see red on the donut doom, we know we need to respond quickly. It's a good, solid dashboard, which is really good for us.

There is a simplicity to setting up the extra sensors. It's really easy for us to build infrastructure and start monitoring very quickly.

The sensors are very simple to use and quick to deploy. I love once the credentials are added at the higher level that we can simply ignore the credential side of things and not to worry about them. You put them in at the top, then they filter down through to all of the various platforms.

We use the remote probes a lot for our branch offices. Instead of deploying the full instance of PRTG, we'll put a remote probe out there. This simplifies the whole deployment for us.

We use a lot of NetFlow sensors for our network equipment. Those NetFlow sensors help us to determine how much of our pipe is being used for particular applications. We use this quite a lot.

The feature set is brilliant. It does everything that we need it to do. If it doesn't, then there is a nice forum that we can jump on. 

We would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us.

I've never had to play around too much with stability. We installed it on the server, put the certificate in, got our URL, and put the DNS record in, then it just does its thing. 

Once you start going above 5000 sensors, things do start to get a bit shaky. There are some best practice out there that you will need to adopt and be aware of.

PRTG has a clustering service, which is useful. We have had a bit of an issue with the WMI at one point where we just had too many WMI queries, but when we just swapped them to different sensor types, it become more efficient. This is not really a negative on scalability as much as ensuring to follow best practices.

The solution can grow with our business. If we need to expand the number of sensors that we are using or expand the number of remote offices that we have, we set up the remote probes with standard templates for sensors or services, and it works.

The tech support has been fine. I haven't had any issues with the tech support at all. They tend to say, "You need to read this part of the manual." 

Generally, it's not the solution or the products in the role area. It's normally the way it's being deployed, the way it's being used, or if you're vastly oversubscribing certain areas of the system. It's just about knowing and being familiar with the system, then you don't have to really talk to tech support.

Nine times out of ten, someone else will have already asked the same question on the PRTG forum as us. 

We implemented the free solution in this company, but it is what I was familiar with. I have used the solution in previous companies before. We did have another monitoring solution, but the speed in which we could get the solution running and my familiarity with it was really helpful.

It was also very easy to take my colleagues through it in the new company in which I was joining. Everyone was quickly on board with it, and we used it as an extra in-depth monitoring on top of our other monitoring stuff.

We experienced network and system downtime before implementing this solution. It was a driving factor in the decision to implement this solution. We had a lot of issues with disk space utilization. We are a quite big company, so we have a lot of people with a lot of files flowing around. We needed an extra level of monitoring on our disks and services.

The initial setup was great and straightforward. Deployment was quick and painless. It just worked out-of-the-box. We were quite surprised that we really didn't have to do much tweaking for it.

Once the services started running, It immediately (within an hour) started monitoring the probe health first. Therefore, we received immediate feedback about the infrastructure that is supporting the service. 

We did everything in-house.

We pay nothing for it. Its 100 sensors have allowed us to put a magnifying glass on some systems, providing an extra layer of detail. Therefore, our outgoing is nothing and our incoming is a lot of useful data that we can react to proactively.

This solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. We can predict a lot of failures and schedule work a lot more effectively. This means we don't need as many people. When you don't know what's going on under the hood, you're always expecting things to go wrong. Then, you have extra staff around to make sure if things do go wrong, you can fix them quickly. 

In my company now, we are using the free version. 

In previous companies, we have had unlimited licenses and going beyond 10,000 sensors with 50 different branch offices.

Primarily, we use PRTG because I am familiar with it. We have licenses for SCOM, but the complexity in setting up that type of solution put us off. It is very much a big beast of a solution. We needed something quick and simple that we could just throw in and get some good figures out of it quickly.

Take a couple of hours in an afternoon and deploy the free version. See what type of sensors are out there, then give it a go. You will find very quickly that it's quite a simple system to use. It doesn't take a lot of time or expertise to set it up and get some good data out of it.

We haven't really used the desktop app. We normally use the central server, then we have the monitoring setup in such a way that we don't need to deploy any extra elements. It just monitors things via the SNMP or WMI. We tend to use the web browser a lot.