PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We use it to manage customers and to keep an eye on when stuff goes down or when stuff is not working as intended. We monitor mostly servers, but we use it to monitor websites and some of the network infrastructure as well.

With the monitoring, certainly for some of our customers that are hosting websites, we've added in PRTG's advanced http sensors, to provide them site monitoring in addition to the server monitoring which we were doing. We can pass the information on to them when they have issues, as opposed to them not knowing until one of their customers contacts them.

I would say the solution makes our IT department more cost-effective because it allows us to respond to things a lot quicker. We can get an idea of where a problem lies in the server, if it's hardware. It saves a bit of time of trying to track down a problem.

It also tells us when we're running into problems with certain bits of infrastructure that we're monitoring.

• It's really easy to use.
• You can see as soon as there is a problem and you can track it down pretty quickly.
• You don't have to go through loads of options to find when something goes wrong.

It's very easy to manage when you've got time to do some work on it: things like adding devices, adding groups, adding sensor clusters, and being able to clone and move stuff around.

I really like the Desktop app. I'm not a big fan of the web app because I've had some browser issues with it. Since finding the desktop app, I have used that exclusively.

Thinking about the overall feature set, I've had no problems with the features that I use. It hasn't happened that I've thought, "I wish I could do this," without being able to usually find an option to do it. Among those options are things like multiple users, different types of reporting, and different actions that occur after a sensor starts. There's always been something in there. I wanted it to auto-confirm when an error does come up in the test lab and, on PRTG's website, they had an API string to do that. Everything that I've needed to do, I've been able to find in the program or on their website.

It has to be installed on a Windows machine. We'd prefer it if we could install the actual control panel on a Linux.

In addition, I wouldn't mind better categories for the sensors. When I go to add a new sensor for a new device, there are some categories in there already, and they can be filtered out, but there's quite a large pool of sensors. That's one thing that I always struggle with. When I want to go in and find something quite specific, I have got to scroll down and scroll down to find what I'm actually looking for, if I want something that I may not have used before. 

With their "recommend sensors" feature, I wouldn't mind seeing that being a bit more able to scan the device that it goes on, as it doesn't necessarily pick up everything that is on there, as it should.

It's rock solid. We restart it, and the Windows machine it sits on, once a month because it's recommended to do so, to update it. We have not had any issues with it going down or not working as intended.

We've been able to scale it up as we've brought more and more customers on. Having a sensor pool which we can dip into and use has been good. If we brought on five or ten customers, we could scale it up quite quickly with cloning and copying of templates.

We started off using open source, Nagios/Cacti-type monitoring software utilities. Yes, they're open source and they don't cost you anything, but adding devices is quite cumbersome, the management is quite difficult, and the training is more difficult. Whereas, the UI of PRTG is much easier to use; much more intuitive. 

Everybody generally starts off open-source, something that won't cost you much, but they soon realize the limits of open-source. PRTG is a company that has invested a lot of time and effort building it to make easy to use, to give it a nice UI, and to make it as responsive as it is. It's just a natural progression.

The driving factor in the decision wasn't that we experienced system downtime, it was the fact that we needed something more enterprise-oriented and something that was easier to use and manage, which PRTG is, compared to Nagios. When something like Nagios breaks, it's quite difficult to get it working again, whereas with PRTG, once you buy a block of sensors you get some support for 12 or 24 months, and you've got somebody to fall back on if you ever need it.

It was already in place when I started with the company. We've moved it across to another system and I've re-set that up and it was just a matter of installing it, setting it up. It was fine, no problems. The usual control-panel install wizard made it very easy to import our old data from our previous install into it as well.

It took about 15 to 20 minutes, from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on the IT infrastructure. That was after we imported all the other data into it.

ROI is hard to measure on something like this. It has helped us out in identifying problems that are likely to happen or that are about to happen or even when they happen. We get notified as quickly as possible. To measure the ROI on that is not an easy thing to do. But, in terms of customer service, it has helped us because we are obviously much more proactive. We notice things before a customer reports them to us. For customer service there would have been some ROI, but it is hard to quantify.

One thing I like is that when you buy sensors, it's a perpetual license, so once you buy 2,000 sensors, you've got 2,000 sensors; it's not a recurring cost. With some products, it's a subscription model where you pay every year.

We looked at SolarWinds. If I remember correctly, it came down to cost. In that regard, PRTG did work out cheaper. In addition, one of our engineers had previously worked with PRTG so he had a bias toward PRTG already. It just made sense to go with it.

You can get the trial version of PRTG, you can get a load of sensors and the actual software package to try. Install it, give it a go, it is very easy to set up. SNMP is very easy to set up on Windows and Linux, and you've got a lot of options within PRTG so you really need to get stuck in and mess about with it to see if it has what you need in it.

In terms of the sensors and remote probes, I don't have many problems with it because everything seems to be covered by it. I've not found something that I've not been able to monitor or that I've not been able to find data for. I have no problems with the probes when it comes to actually sending them and receiving the data. They just go out, collect the data. I have no network problems with it.

We only monitor certain parts of the network with PRTG, but we do compare some of the historical data to real-time data, just to make sure everything's running smoothly and nothing looks out of place.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. It is a very solid product; it does what we need it to do. There are a few bits and pieces that I wish I could do with it which, due to what it is, they don't offer.

We primarily monitor Windows-based servers and services running within them. We also have some ties-in scripting into more bespoke areas, as well on our network.

We host a virtual environment running VMware in-house.

The historical data is used for looking at trends: Where we are versus where we were and whether or not additional loads may be our system. We are able to see this over a period of time, looking back historically.

The solution provides us with needed the feedback on our IT infrastructure. We use 12 monitoring servers, which we use to monitor our wide area network and router switches, so we do monitor bandwidth. From a network point of view, we can see the state of the network, as well as bandwidth usage and downtime.

The immediacy of the alerting is the most valuable feature. My role is to keep our network up and running. We have a dashboard in the office and are able to see things almost in real-time, within a minute or two. This is the greatest benefit.

The scripting element allows the bespoke option, so I am not just tied in to what is provided out-of-the-box. We have created a few bespoke scripts, e.g., we have tied it into our phone system to do various things, like monitor SIP trunks. 

The product is flexible, and we can move outside the predefined probes. Although to be fair, there are quite a lot of those to choose from anyway. The out-of-the-box probes generally suit us fine.

There are so many out-of-the-box features to look at that there are very few things that we have had to write bespoke scripts for. We don't have a particularly diverse environment to monitor, since it is all very box bound, Microsoft products, and relatively new.

Although they are fairly comprehensive with what you can do with them, the mapping and dashboards are a bit clunky to set up. I would like a more straightforward ability to create dashboards and maps. The network maps should be a bit more flexibility in the GUI to do what we need to do.

I don't have an issue with the stability of the monitoring probes and the basic server. 

We have had a few issues with the web elements, as far as the dashboard. With the dashboard, it has to be manually refreshed. Occasionally, we reboot the server, or at least web services, due to the web aspect. However, these don't affect the underlining monitoring.

We have started out with a 1000 probes. We're currently running, or have licenses for about 2500, running about 2000 individual probes on the system. It is showing a strain on the server. We are running on a Windows VM at the moment. We have somewhere in the region of 64GB and 4 Core running it. It is an okay server, but it is showing signs of a bit of a slow down, needing patches, updates, and reboots. It does take a while to come back to life.

We have added more probes to the solution. From the monitoring side, it is fine. However, using the server and rebooting, it is showing its age, especially if I have to restart services. Whether or not it is the application or the hardware that it is running on. 

It is doing the job for us and has scaled up from where it was originally.

If you are a small company with a few servers, the product is overkill. For a larger enterprise (like us), we have around a 120 Windows servers in our environment, and it seems absolutely fine. If you're a small company, you probably want more simple, straightforward products, as you don't need the features.

I haven't had that much reason to go to them. 

A colleague of mine primarily does the updates and patching version updates. We have had a couple of issues with incompatibility after the updates. Then, we have had cause to use the tech support. The issues aren't outstanding for too long.

Prior to implementing this, we had some very basic home written ways of determining things, like remaining space on disk. It was very fundamental and wasn't fit for the purpose. It was for when the business had half-dozen servers, and as we grew, it wasn't. We knew we needed something, so we looked around, settling on PRTG.

There wasn't an incident that lead us to implement the PRTG Network Monitor solution. Obviously, all systems will have issues now and then. We knew we had to put something in place, but there wasn't a specific incident or instance that drove us in this product's direction.

The solution provides us response times to issues, since we didn't have any of this type monitoring prior to putting PRTG in. The product has created a more robust environment. As an infrastructure manager, I am less at the mercy of staff members who are trying to find and work things out more quickly. There are just provided for me.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, as there were a lot of basic elements out-of-the-box.

As soon as any probes are in place, there is feedback straightaway from the system.

We purchased it through our reseller and implemented it ourselves.

It does help the IT department prevent or mitigate downtime. It allows us to pick things up which might not have been picked up that would have caused downtime. While there is a cost saving, it's rather intangible and difficult to state.

We are licensed for 2500 endpoints.

I don't have any comparison with direct competitors. We have been using PRTG for the better part of possibly ten years now. We haven't found the feature set lacking. Everything that we have tried to do, we have managed to work with PRTG to do it.

I would be happy to recommend PRTG. I have no qualms with it whatsoever. 

It does what we need it to do and is flexible. There are some areas, like setting up dashboards, which could be improved upon. However, I have no major problems with the solution and no concerns with renewing next time around.

I find the functionality within the web interface very feature-rich (compared to other products), so I have very few reasons to use the desktop app.

We use the solution for full network monitoring, to manage our entire estate; that includes things like disk space and network usage. It alerts us of any potential outages so that we can attend to those before they occur.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance in that we do quite a lot of analysis on our network traffic. We want our user experience to be the best that it can possibly be. We'll look for trends in things like login times, disk space usage, how much we're burning through. That feature absolutely helps us.

Also, before we used this solution we had issues with the servers running out of disk space. This has completely stopped all that now. We've put in decent thresholds whereby we're not running out of disk space before we know there's an issue. We give ourselves plenty of leeway so that doesn't happen anymore.

When it comes to feedback on our IT infrastructure, again it's the disk space, but also the utilization of our network. If, for instance, a switch is getting overloaded, we can take proactive action to prevent any problems. That's the main kind of driver for us. This doesn't let us get into trouble. We are aware of problems before they occur.

The most valuable feature for us is the disk space and CPU usage because we are quite intensive in those fields. PRTG gives us the visibility into those straight away. We've got it set up in a pie-chart with all of our servers down the left-hand side. If everything's green, everything's working. If it's amber, there's a potential issue. If it's red, then we're in trouble, and it's as simple as that. It's a traffic-light system. It works perfectly.

Ease of access is important as well - it's all in the product, it's all in the sensors - and it has been great for us. The sensors and probes are great, nice and lightweight, they don't take up too many resources on the system. We just deploy them out and they start reporting instantly.

The desktop app is great. We've got it set to auto update, and it just ticks away nicely. We also use the mobile app as well. Various members of our infrastructure team have got that app on their mobile devices, so when they're out of the office they can check up on the estate, as well. We can do 24/7 monitoring.

The only thing we have been looking at, which is not so much about the solution itself, is some training. I know there are a lot of online training resources, but some classroom-based training is one of the things that we have been looking for. 

Also, when it comes to third-party integration, one of the things we were looking at was putting some sensors onto our firewall, for instance. If there were a little bit more documentation and some step-by-step guides around that, that would be useful for us. That would be about the only thing I would say regarding the product itself.

It's very stable. We've never had any kind of outages in terms of the dashboard not being available. Any updates that we've applied haven't caused us any issues. It's a great, reliable product.

We've not found any kind of real performance degradation. There may have been times where some of the sensors may have paused slightly but I think they were just anomalies. It has not been a regular occurrence. Perhaps there have been occasional stability issues, but they have been very few and far between.

It's very scalable. At the moment we have around 1,000 or 1,200 sensors. We know that it would be very easy if we wanted to expand that. We could simply add in more sensors very easily.

I don't think we've ever actually had to engage with technical support because we've never had any issues with it. That speaks for itself.

The main driver behind our decision was that we partnered up with a third-party which did all our monitoring for us but we moved away from that. There was a requirement to do it ourselves and that's why we chose PRTG.

Our setup was very straightforward because we planned out what our estate looks like through network diagrams, decided on what metrics we wanted to capture, and then deployed it across. The product itself made it very easy for us to do that.

From setup to the start of data analysis took three to five days.

We used our preferred reseller, which is CCS Media. But we had already done research into the product ourselves. It was just a case of buying the license through our reseller.

On a yearly basis, I believe it's between £1,200 and £1,500. It's relatively inexpensive, for what we need.

We didn't really consider anything else because we'd previously used PRTG, before we used our third-party partner. It was very easy for us to come back to it.

You should absolutely look at this solution. It gives us everything that we need: The lightweight aspect of it on the network, the amount of information. It's absolutely worth the money.

In terms of the feature set, the overall impression is very good. We've been using the product for just over 12 months now. We've just recently renewed that license because the product is very good and gives us all the information that we need.

We bought around 1,200 or 1,500 sensors. Our estate supports around 450 users. I think we've almost maxed out on how many sensors we've deployed because we've got quite a large estate. We've got around 150 servers, and then we also have 100 or so switches. With all those, it's very easy to burn through our sensor limit.

I rate PRTG at ten out ten, easily, because of the ease of use, the information provided, and the fact that we've never had to raise any kind of technical support ticket. That in itself should sell the product.

We use PRTG as part of a general support platform we offer to our clients. It provides a single pane of glass to monitor network hardware and software and head off critical incidents. 

The network visualization helps us to drill down deeper. 

PRTG could use reporting tools and mobile alert tools. It should be easier to diagnose and respond to problems from a mobile device on the go. 

I have used PRTG Network Monitor for about three years.

I rate PRTG seven out of 10 for stability. It's stable, fast, and accurate.

PRTG has above-average scalability. 

I rate PRTG Network Monitor seven out of 10. 

We are a system integrator and this is one of the monitoring products that we implement for our clients.

Our customers use it for monitoring their networks.

The most valuable feature is autodiscovery.

Most of the sensors are available for it, such as traffic sensors and SNMP sensors. They have a very wide library that we can use.

From a view perspective, it should be more customizable.

Other monitoring tools that I have used are easier to use.

I have been working with PRTG Network Monitor for two months. The company has been using it for approximately two years.

Over the approximately two years that the company has been using this product, it has been very stable.

This is a scalable product. We have six people in the company that use it.

I have specific requirements for data that I have to gather. Of more than 400 data points that are available, I only need approximately 40. So, at this point, I'm only utilizing about 10% of the capability.

We have asked questions of their technical support and they have a very good response time. They immediately jump in and solve any issues that we have, as well as answer our inquiries.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

In the past, I have worked with a lot of different monitoring tools.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The licensing fees are billed annually and there are no costs in addition to this.

We evaluated several other solutions and one of the reasons that we chose PRTG is because they provided us with a free trial that included all of the sensors. This gives you the opportunity to test the product and see it work. After that, if you are satisfied with it, you can purchase it.

The other solutions that we tried will give you only a few sensors. You do not have the full functionality of the system available for testing.

Overall, this is a good product but there are other monitoring tools that are easier to use.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I have experience in configurations and troubleshooting, and I use PRTG Network Monitor for network monitoring activities, e.g. monitoring the bandwidth and where it's coming from. For example, I use NetFlow instead of SNMP only.

We had a big amount of bandwidth being used, and I wanted to check whoever was using that amount of bandwidth. We managed to find the source IP address of who was using that specific bandwidth amount, with the help of PRTG Network Monitor.

The features I like the most about PRTG Network Monitor are its NetFlow Collector and graphical monitoring functions.

More training videos for installing and configuring PRTG Network Monitor would have been nice, especially when working with a lot of devices.

I've been using PRTG Network Monitor for three years now, but not on a daily basis.

PRTG Network Monitor is a stable tool.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable, but you'll need to take care of the cost to scale up, because it can be costly.

I had no issues with the support team for this product. I contacted support once, when I needed information on a type of configuration that could possibly be done on PRTG Network Monitor.

The tool is easy to install, but it needs to be done by a technical team, because
you need to configure the network devices to connect with PRTG Network Monitor. It took two hours to install and configure. The configuration can be lengthy because there were a lot of devices, so more training videos could have been helpful.

When you have a lot of devices, PRTG Network Monitor can be costly.

We deploy PRTG Network Monitor both on the Cloud and on-premises. We use Storm Cloud, but we cater to many clients, so we implement according to what the client wants.

We have one user who handles and maintains this product, e.g. an admin who knows the type of installation. If there's configuration involved, we have one engineer who handles that. There are other products like Zabbix that you can use for free, and since PRTG Network Monitor is costly, we sometimes use Zabbix.

I'm giving PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten.

 PRTG Network Monitor is used to monitor our client's network.

The most valuable feature of PRTG Network Monitor is its ease of use.

PRTG Network Monitor can improve by having better integration with devices.

I have used PRTG Network Monitor within the past 12 months.

The price of PRTG Network Monitor is reasonable. 

I rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of ten.

We are using the latest update.

We use the solution for our firewall interface and bandwidth monitoring.

The solution may be modified to meet one's requirements. Mine are simply for SNMP bandwidth monitoring for my network interfaces. Others may have different needs when it comes to the solution. 

The capabilities the solution provides us meet our needs. We feel the solution and its features to be valuable.

We like the alerting system, the SNMP monitoring and the customization of the bandwidth. It dives deeply into the information concerning metrics. These are the reasons we chose to go with the solution. 

The automation should be improved. I am talking about automation by code and processes and provisioning the IP desk. Should the automation capabilities be addressed, I would raise my rating from an eight to a ten out of ten. 

We have been using PRTG Network Monitor for many years. 

The solution has good performance and I find it to be stable. 

The solution suits our scalability needs. We also onboard many other systems. 

We have our own technical team. As such, there has been no need for us to be in touch with technical support. 

Prior to the solution, we made use of Zabbix and continue to do so in respect of customers and management. We also tried out another product. 

The initial setup was simple, really straightforward.

Our team handled the entire setup, internally. 

Of course, the solution requires maintenance once deployed, as does every software in respect of upgrade, configuration and data backup requirements. This is part of one's product governance. 

Our price involves less than 5,000 tiers.

We are satisfied with the price. 

When software version releases come out, we simply install and upgrade them. 

The solution is cloud-based. We hosted our platform into our own cloud infrastructure.

For the moment, we are not looking for integration with other products. 

There are, perhaps, 25 users making use of the solution in our organization.

The solution boasts good performance. 

I would certainly recommend the solution to others. 

I rate PRTG Network Monitor as an eight out of ten.