PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

Our primary use case is monitoring when our network fails, when a server goes down or a site goes down. We have five sites.

We're more proactive. Usually, we already know when something has gone down by the time we get the phone calls. When someone says, "We can't log in," or "We can't get on the internet," we probably already know about it.

It makes us, as an IT department, more "time-effective" and if time is a cost then it makes us more cost-effective. Rather than getting 20 phone calls, we can just send an email out, company-wide, saying, "We know this has occurred, we're looking at it." It's cost-effective, time-wise.

Its proactiveness is its most valuable feature. We already know when we come in, in the morning, if a server or site is down, as opposed to someone telling us. Before, we'd have to find out ourselves, check it ourselves, which we were not likely to do, realistically. I wouldn't come in, first thing in the morning and see if all the servers were up, are all the sites were up. It was not the first thing I'd do.

The sensors and remote probes are good. I've used them for a while. The sensors are good because you can change the length of time before they notify you. One of the problems we used to have was that we had it on 30-second alerts, so as soon as there was a slight network blip we would get an email. What's good is that they're adaptable.

Overall, the solution's feature set is really good. I've probably only used about ten percent of it. We use the Ping sensors and the bandwidth utilization sensors. We don't use half of the rest. What we are using is fairly key to what we do.

It probably has this already, but if it had a mobile app that would be helpful. For example, on a day like today when I'm out, if I could just fire it up and see green, green, green, green, green or red, that would be good.

The stability of the solution is very good. We've had no issues with it. It's pretty sound. It always works. I can't really fault it.

It is scalable. We've only got a small infrastructure, but if we had a larger infrastructure it would be fine. We probably only monitor 20 to 30 devices on it. We could do more but we don't.

I've never used their technical support, but I suppose that's a good reflection on the product itself.

I've used it for quite a while. I just played around with it initially, it's pretty intuitive. I might google the odd problem I've had with it, and how to do this, that, and the other but most the time it's intuitive enough.

We had system downtime before implementing the solution. I've been where I am now for about eight years. Before, there were issues all over the shop. I walked in and we had servers that had no disk space, which this product can look at. We had issues with poor connectivity to certain sites which this will obviously flush out.

One of the reasons we went with it is because I had used it before.

The only downside - and it's a minor thing - is when I've uninstalled it. I usually install it on a server to use the probe. When you uninstall it, it requires a reboot and sometimes it doesn't quite warn you enough that it's going to reboot the server, so you have to be very careful.

From the time we set up solution until it provided with us with feedback on the infrastructure was 20 minutes. Install it and it's working 20 minutes later.

It has a free trial so I would give it a go, you have nothing to lose really. Just try it. It doesn't take long to set up.

I rate PRTG at eight out of ten. I wouldn't go higher because I haven't investigated it, used it fully-optimized. But I'm really happy that it does what it needs to do.

We use it mostly for monitoring our servers, network equipment, firewall, etc.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. And where it comes in very handy for me is in problem solving. I need to look at what has been going on for the last week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, even months, and it gives me that information. I was having an issue at a particular time of day and it actually helped me fix the issue. It was absolutely invaluable.

We're a very small department so the need to find an issue quickly is important to us. PRTG has helped us with that a lot. It enables our IT department to be more cost-effective because we don't have to keep going through support departments.

It also provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It is really critical to us to know what's gone down. I received an email the other day saying that one of our servers was down. It's very important to us to receive that information. I received it at ten o'clock at night and I was able to remote on and fix the issue before anyone had even noticed it had gone down.

The best feature is that it lets me know what is going on. I need to know if something has gone down, I need to know if something is running very slowly. PRTG tells me that.

I like the dashboard and the new feature which makes it a black dashboard. I also get emails and notifications, which I love.

The sensors and remote probes are very good. Sometimes they pick up far too much information, but I'd rather have far too much than not enough, so that's a benefit. They show the performance of hard drives and the like. How fast a process is going is critical information for our service. We have a 24/7 business so I need to know what's going on 24/7.

There seems to be a big jump from the basic scan to the really thorough scan. There is a big jump in the quantity of sensors it uses for certain things. One minute you might get ten and then the next you get 200. There seems to be a big jump between the two at times.

It's pretty stable. It's been up and running now for about two years, which is very stable. There has been the odd crash but that was more the server it was on rather than PRTG. It's very stable.

Scaling is very easy. You just need to buy licenses to increase the scale and away you go. It takes minutes to scale it.

I've never used their technical support. I've never needed to. I've never had problems that I couldn't fix myself.

I do use the knowledge base online quite a bit, so that might count as technical support, but I have never contacted support.

We used a free product, although I can't remember the name of it. It was good but it wasn't giving us the feedback we wanted, especially for alerts. As I said, for our company that's extremely important but we just weren't getting those alerts. We did some research, found PRTG, and I spoke to another company that used it. They really loved it so we went ahead got the free license initially, did a trial, found it absolutely amazing, and then bought it.

We went with it because of a good review from somebody I know, which is always a good start. Also, the price was pretty good, very competitive. Finally, we experienced system downtime before implementing the solution and that was a driving factor in our decision. We needed something to help us stop that from happening, or at least to alert us that it was happening.

The initial setup was dead-easy. It was just pretty much "next, next, next," put in some credentials, set up a scan with the IP addresses and away it went. There really wasn't much to it.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our infrastructure wasn't long: two to three hours max. Even with setting up the probes, setting up the scan, and the IP addresses, it didn't take long, maybe a couple of hours.

I did it myself.

The ROI for us is time, massively. We had an issue a few weeks back, it was after work hours and we had a server that had gone down. I was at home and noticed it - got the alert - connected up and fixed the issue. Most people didn't even notice. If that had been left until the morning, there would have been big issues for directors, time and money, if that server had been down.

We looked at SolarWinds and we looked at NetManage but went for PRTG in the end.

I'd highly recommend PRTG. It's a very good product and the price is pretty good as well. Some of the others I looked at were very expensive.

I don't really use the Desktop app. I prefer to see the web-based version.

The overall feature set is very good. It can be a little memory-intensive, that's one downside as it does eat quite a bit of memory, but other than that, it's very good. It picks up all the sensors, does everything I need it to. I've not really found a product yet that it doesn't scan, which is great. Overall, really good.

I would never give a ten out of ten, but I will go with an eight. It is a little bit memory-intensive and sometimes it gives a bit too much information but, as I said previously, I'd rather have too much than too little so it's not too bad. I would give it a solid eight.

Our use case for PRTG Network Monitor was end-to-end monitoring, but we couldn't achieve it, particularly the monitoring from the perspective of looking at the complete dashboard of the entire infrastructure, though it's a server virtualization network. For example, monitoring any device, even a swiping machine or a camera, or any device which comes and adopts an IP address should be monitored using PRTG Network Monitor, so that was our use case in the beginning.

Eventually, we then wanted the tool to also monitor our applications, so our current use case for PRTG Network Monitor is to monitor applications residing on our infrastructure, apart from devices that use or adopt IP addresses.

There was only one feature I liked about PRTG Network Monitor a lot, and that was bandwidth monitoring, though, in the newer versions of the tool, that feature is now a bit lacking.

Pricing for PRTG Network Monitor is also not as expensive.

It's a good tool, even for beginners.

A room for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is its sensors. Its application technology sensor, such as the IAS, .NET, etc., needs some improvement because it doesn't work as expected. For example, the IAS sensor doesn't give immediate information, and the information you get from it isn't of good value.

The web GUI of PRTG Network Monitor also needs improvement because errors keep popping up if it's not been updated to the latest version.

What I'd like to see in the next release of the tool is end-to-end topology mapping for the business model, and that should be required. There has to be a technical map. Technical mapping and topological creation are missing in PRTG Network Monitor, so I would like to see those in the future.

I've been using PRTG Network Monitor effectively for five years now, though I also used it in 2010, but only for very basic monitoring. Nowadays, I'm using the tool more extensively and doing a lot of monitoring on it.

In terms of the stability of PRTG Network Monitor, I would rate it a three out of five because this works on the web browser, but it requires too many updates. You have to update it frequently. For example, as soon as it's not running on the latest version, it starts giving you errors on the browsers, so it has a big room for improvement in terms of its web GUI.

PRTG Network Monitor is a scalable tool, and I'm rating it three out of five in terms of scalability.

We were in discussion with the PRTG Network Monitor technical support team quite intensively, but they weren't able to answer all our questions. We find them okay and up to the mark because they know what the tool can do and cannot do, so they were very, very precise, so at least their knowledge about their product was good.

We used a different solution before using PRTG Network Monitor, but that wasn't an apple-to-apple comparison. For example, we used an IP monitor from SolarWinds, but that was just a Ping or ICMP utility.

The initial setup for PRTG Network Monitor was not that complex, but you need to understand how it works, so it's not very difficult, yet it's not very easy. The setup for the tool is on the moderate side. On a scale of one to five, I'd give the setup a rating of three because if you'd like to effectively use PRTG Network Monitor, you need to set it up correctly.

It took almost a week to set the tool up correctly, but the actual installation was done in one day, with the bare minimum configuration and discoveries because it has a good discovery feature.

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

I've already seen ROI from PRTG Network Monitor.

PRTG Network Monitor is not that expensive, so I like it cost-wise. There's no additional cost apart from the standard licensing fees. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I would rate the cost of PRTG Network Monitor a two.

I'm using the latest version of PRTG Network Monitor because my company keeps updating the tool.

In my company, teams in Support and IT use PRTG Network Monitor and quite effectively look at the dashboard very often, so around one hundred people use it. Deployment was done in multiple places so seven to eight people in different regions took care of the deployment separately. At the moment, my company has no plans of increasing the usage of PRTG Network Monitor.

My advice to others looking into implementing PRTG Network Monitor is that if you're looking from a holistic infrastructure deployment and monitoring perspective, it's a good tool to use and to start with. PRTG Network Monitor is a good tool for beginners, so if you're a beginner, use it. If you're not a beginner, then you would need a tool with very exclusive end-to-end features.

I'm rating PRTG Network Monitor six out of ten.

My company is a customer of PRTG Network Monitor and has no partnership with the vendor.

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the valuable features include the following.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We didn't have a previous solution in place. 

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

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

We did it ourselves. It was so easy.

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

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

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

I would recommend trying PRTG and seeing the benefits.

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

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

We sell the product to customers and handle their problems. From every problem that we handle, we learn from it.

As a company, we deploy WiFi network in major hotels (four or five star level). The guests who come to stay in those hotels are very sensitive to availability and performance. So, we have to monitor the bandwidth high availability, as well as the basic infrastructure, such as checking the system and all the IT infrastructure in those hotels. 

Today, we have a lot of customers, hundreds in India and neighboring countries, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Some of our customers have taken us to Malaysia because they did business with us in India. We also work with two countries in Africa, Congo and Nigeria.

We use the product internally. Because we are a networking company, we are able to diagnose customer's network problems so our customers are happy.

We go to the customer telling them that we are not here to sell the product. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If we have an unhappy customer, we can't sleep.

1. The product is simple and easy to implement.
2. The licensing is quick and simple.
3. I can create my own program sensor. This means I can add extra monitoring capabilities into the already fundamentally strong foundation.
4. I can write a few pieces of code in the partial capture.
5. It helps the entire organization become digitally enabled.

PRTG is very good to do business with. The contract is simple. They are very responsive. 

We would like to monitor certain aspects of the user experience. We should be able to analyze the cause of end user experience, bad or good, so we can do some research and development on our own.

In a very few cases, customers want more detailed reports, which we cannot meet.

PRTG has another level of scaling. There are XL1 and XL5. XL1 has one core and XL5 has four cores. If your network is big, you can distribute the database and reporting load on five different servers. You can have a common view of the entire global network using the enterprise console.

It is scalable. We have yet to hit a ceiling.

95% of the problems or more that we get from customers are solved locally.

When you buy PRTG, everything comes in one bundle. Licensing is very easy. It is not like SolarWinds or Ops Manager, where I can buy pieces separately if I want high availability or Syslog. It becomes painful. The basic version looks cheap, but NetFlow has to be bought separately on SolarWinds. In PRTG, there are no questions asked, and everything comes together.

SolarWinds is a bit complex, so the customer may have to buy the product license and have to pay a little extra for training and deployment of the license. In the case of PRTG, the product is so easy that we give the customer three online sessions, and they are happy since we don't charge them for that.

Don't believe what you see in writing. Deploy it, then test it. It is easy to deploy and cost-effective.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Easy to do business with.
• Responsiveness.
• The vendor should be committed.

We use the product for network monitoring. 

The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts. 

PRTG Network Monitor needs to show bandwidth utilization in proper graphs. It isn't easy to learn. 

PRTG Network Monitor is stable. 

My company has two users for the product. 

I haven't contacted the tool's technical support yet. 

PRTG Network Monitor is cheap. 

I rate the solution a five out of ten. 

We are using this solution for the health check of our infrastructure.

It is user-friendly. It is easy to set up health checks within PRTG and use scans. It is like a self-service tool, and anyone can configure their own settings within PRTG.

In our organization, we encounter performance issues with our PRTG probe service. I saw documentation from the vendor or Paessler mentioning that there are limitations for WMI sensors. Other than that, we are okay with PRTG.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It is stable.

Its scalability is fine. We have between 300 to 500 people. We have plans to increase its usage.

Their support is good. We can easily reach out to the vendor or the Paessler support team.

When I started with my company, they were already using PRTG and SCOM. PRTG is more user-friendly than SCOM. I prefer PRTG over SCOM, but it also depends on the use case.

The pricing for PRTG in our case is reasonable because we have a lot of applications to monitor within PRTG. It is not that expensive.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of 10.