PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We use it for some internet providers and educational institutes.

It is very flexible, and we can monitor many aspects of IT as well as ERP and CRM services. It has a very powerful interface and APIs for customization. 

Its price can be better. Its price is a problem for us because it is in dollars, and there is a high conversion rate. 

In terms of new features, it can have BGP monitoring. It should also have a dashboard and maps editor.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

It is installed on a Windows Server, and its stability is very nice.

Its scalability is good. For on-premises deployments, the scalability depends on the hardware. For cloud deployments, the scalability depends on the number of servers.

Around 50% of our clients are small organizations and around 20% of our clients are big organizations.

Their technical support is pretty good. As a reseller, we get fairly good support from them, and we also sell support services for our clients.

The initial setup is very easy. An average implementation takes one to two hours.

It is expensive.

They have a roadmap in which they have described all the features for the upcoming releases. This roadmap is available on their portal.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a ten out of ten.

Within our organization, only the network department uses this solution — there are eight of us.

It gives me a live view of the traffic on the WAN. It produces reports on errors and faulty devices. It also produces a lot of logs on what is afoot. I can produce many reports using it.

It needs to have more monitoring on end-user devices. We can monitor a set of network devices, but not end-users' devices.

It would be nice if it gave us alerts via Gmail or SMS message.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

PRTG Network Monitor is both scalable and stable.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is very straightforward — it's just a simple cover server.

We are currently evaluating many other security solutions.

I would recommend this solution because it's great for monitoring network traffic and producing reports.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

We have offices around Australia, we're a company organization with a couple of hundred people where we monitor four or five offices and their networks. We use the solution on a daily basis. We're a customer of PRTG and I'm president of our company. 

We like the solution's report writing and the way that it compiles the system's information from around the network and brings it all back into the central site and the interface. 

The solution could be improved by increasing the way that it polls the different engines which we feel is quite slow. It also doesn't integrate very well with service desks or anything else. Pre-packaged integrations with other product sets would be something we'd like to see in any future release.

I've been using this solution for three and a half years. 

The solution is stable except for when you want to do upgrades and then they try to move everyone over to the cloud versions. 

The solution is scalable, it's just a matter of including another piece of software and hooking it up through the network, through the Cisco routers, and away you go. 

I previously used Zabbix and Nagios which are problematic performance wise. They're not modern and neither are the interfaces. We prefer PRTG. 

The initial setup of the solution was easy. Our guys did some of it in-house and then we got an external party to help us, a local specialist. Implementation probably took about three months to get it to the point where we were happy with it.

Use of the product requires planning. Start with your ideas on paper first before you start doing your deployment and then ask yourself 'what if' questions - what if this or that happens. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have deployed this solution on numerous platforms.

The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors. For example, we have an HP Server, but we do not need an HP Server monitor, or a separate storage monitoring system that is specific to HP. We are able to use this solution for a centralized, multiple-technology safe.

The dashboarding definitely needs improvement.

It would be nice if they included support for analytics, such as functionality to help understand trends in the data. The data might include network outages, network utilization, and storage utilization. Also, if there is any kind of predictive ability coming out then it would add a lot of value.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

Our environment contains two and a half thousand servers and ten thousand desktops.

We have six people who perform the support functions. It is used on a daily basis, and we are planning on expanding usage to include access to our help desk. There are automated tickets generated when PRTG picks up faults on the network.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We used WhatsUp Gold prior to this solution. There were multiple problems with varying versions and support channels, and there is no standardization or central visibility with all of the instances.

What we wanted was a tool that is scalable and could be used in a modular approach, so we chose PRTG and moved away from WhatsUp Gold.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward.

The deployment took approximately three months. There are a vast number of files and a level of complexity in our environment, but that is not the fault of the vendor. Unfortunately, given that we do not have a small environment, the deployment took time.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and we were very happy with their service.

We have not been measuring ROI from a financial perspective. Rather, we are looking at measuring efficiency. This is determined by looking at how quickly we discover faults and how quickly they are remedied. We have just started with this.

We have an unlimited perpetual license, so we just pay support costs and it can scale throughout the organization. 

For anybody who is interested in implementing this solution, I would say that planning is essential. It can be very complex and can generate a lot of data. You can become overwhelmed and then the solution becomes irrelevant because of the number of reports and alerts that it can generate. Planning is critical.

This solution is geared towards practical alerting and monitoring. It is not really meant to give advice or any sort of analytics.

Overall, this is a very good platform and provides value to the organization. However, in terms of the dashboards, there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to manage our systems internally. At some point, we will be offering it as a managed service.

It has helped us make sure that most of our systems stay up. It has also helped us optimize our systems. For a lot of our systems, our software is a service, so they've worked absolutely fine on their own. Where we can't offer software as a service, like our website, it has helped us optimize these applications and keep the uptime on them, helping ensure they stay working.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us look back at prior instances, then we can use that information to come up with a solution or make improvements.

It is pretty simple to use, which is always a good thing. It's been very reliable in updating us if any issues crop up.

The sensors and remote probes seem to work absolutely fine. They don't seem to take up, if any, resources on the machines, which they keep an eye on quite nicely.

The solution's feature set is very good. It seems to be extremely reliable and all its features work. There is less for us to do, because it does what we need it to do.

While the desktop app is good, they could slightly improve it. We would like it to be a single pane of glass. At the moment, you can only see certain portions of information. You have to scroll through to make it more granular. We want them to develop the desktop app to be more user-friendly.

I would like a screen where you can get all the information without have to granually go look for it. If they can make it, so you can sort your own dashboard and customize it based on your needs that would be great.

I have never seen this solution go down once. Compared to everything else out there, which you see drop once in a while, this solution hasn't done that since we've taken it up.

It seems very easy to scale up. When you configure it, that is all you need to do. You only need to set it up once.

The solution will grow with our business. If we do need to add anything to the solution, it has not been a problem. Do it once, and that's it. It is done.

We have never really had to use them because the solution has been working that well. 

The company is only about a year old. This was the first solution that we used.

The initial setup is a tiny bit complex, but you expect these things to be a bit complex. However, it wasn't anything too taxing nor did it take a long time to set up.

It took a couple days from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure from monitoring.

We are the reseller, so we did the deployment.

It has saved us time. At previous companies that I have worked for, they have used similar solutions, which were not as good as this one. They still had to put a bit of work into working out why and what happened. This solution seems to give us an answer straightaway.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The reliability of the solution means we are doing less work trying to figure out issues and optimize systems, as it is already supplying us with the information that we need. Therefore, it has saved us a lot of time and effort.

Give the soluton serious consideration. If you are not too sure about it, try the free version. Then, if you like it, you can go to the paid version and roll it out.

My technical director chose this solution out of all the products that he had a look at, as it stood out straightaway.

The modes for the desktop app, like the API, update via email, providing us the information that we need with handy options, which we use mostly when monitoring. There are easily integratable into our call logging system, which automatically logs a call when there is an issue.

• We run two data centers and are a hosted voice provider. 
• We have an Azure presence. 
• We use PRTG as a monitoring solution to effectively monitor all of our servers, routing infrastructure, and switches. 
• We have some Session Border Controllers, which are effectively Voice Firewalls. We monitor the uptime and availability of those via things like Ping. However, we are also using SNMP sensors. 
• We've written some SQL queries that PRTG is utilizing. 
• We check things, like error logs, through PRTG.
• We are feeding things, like system log messages. 
• We use SNMP Traps.

The scheduling has improved organization, effectively the ability to set maintenance windows where alerts won't go off on an evening. We have an on call router, as many businesses do. In our previous on call solution, we would be inundated with information that would come through outside of working, core business hours, which meant that the on call staff, like myself, were woken up when we didn't need to be. Whereas, with PRTG, it has been great. We can go in, and say "We only care about these core set of criteria outside of this time period." 

If there are upgrades, or things where we know alerts will be generated, we can go in and suppress those. While quite a simple feature, it is comprehensive, and it has a lot of capability to it.

The product is easy to use. The web interface is fantastic. It is very easy to create a user, giving it to someone with little explanation of how to use it. That is its biggest strength. 

It is very colorful. We have used it in quite an open office environment. We have screens on maps that we've made, which is great when customers come in. It gives them a clean visual.

There is a great variety or sensors. We use the custom SNMP sensors quite a lot, where you can import MIB files. The sensors has some cool little tools, as well, which you can use for modifying MIB files and importing them to PRTG. 

It is nice to have one place where all the information is right there in front of us.

The capacity planning is quite good, as you can monitor the CPU increase over time. While it is a manual process, we can go in and correlate it against an increase in user count, etc.

The feature set is very strong compared to other products that I have used. It's great, because it does everything that we need it to do. It's easy to use. It looks great when you present it in an open office environment. If you have it onscreen, it displays the information nicely. The ability to set thresholds against sensors are great. 

The desktop app is terrible. If I had to pick any flaw with the product, that is it. It seems like they haven't updated it. It has been six months since I last used it, and while they may have done something since, it was somewhat clunky. We use 4K resolutions on our laptops, and it didn't work properly. So, we had a few problems with the desktop app.

I would like to see improvements on the desktop app and mobile app. We use the mobile app a bit. However, since we try to keep our data centers really fenced and secure, we don't use it extensively, just in our offices. Some improvements to the desktop application would be great. 

The thing that we do struggle with a bit is in the historic data. If I want look over 30 days, because it averages out onto one graph, you can't zoom in and drill down information. E.g., if we had a problem with something a week ago, I can't really go back in and drill into what that might be, because it has already averaged it out over that time. While I get that this might be for technical reasons, it is still a bit of a limitation.

We run it in a cluster, so we have two that run together. The cluster behind it is sketchy at times. Maybe that might be due to a configuration on our side. 

From the stability point of view, it's 90 percent there.

Now that we have the distributor remote probes, it is pretty strong. The product used to be affected by load. This was because we were exceeding their recommendations. If you follow the recommended hardware guidelines and keep the sensor count to what they recommend, then it is pretty stable.

The remote probe thing is great. We have multiple data centers with multiple regions that we have to monitor. It's nice to know that all we have to do is throw up a remote probe into one of these areas, then have it talk back to the master cluster. We don't have to worry about anything outside of that. We don't have to worry about deploying brand new PRTG servers, as it's a lightweight installer. From there, we can even do an auto scan.

If we do build an entire new data center, we can just install a probe, get it to scan its local subnet, then feed that information back, which is really good.

The solution can 100 percent grow with our business.

The technical support seems to be quick, clever, and has a comprehensive knowledge base online, which is fantastic.

We have never really had a point where we were like, "We want to do this," but PRTG was the limiting factor. If we do ever hit that point, which we do on occasion, the technical support is brilliant. 

You can go to the technical support, and say, "We want to achieve this." For example, we wanted to compare two links in completely different data centers. We wanted a way where could present a graph on the screen that would compare the two and see how they were doing against each other. We didn't know how to do it. We couldn't figure out how to do it, so we approached PRTG. They said, "It's fine. You just want to do a custom sensor and follow these steps." 

If we do ever hit walls, we go to the technical support. To be fair, we rarely seem to hit any walls.

Before PRTG, we used something called MRTG, which was an open source alternative. Previously, it was very clustered, small monitoring systems which were just syslog-based with  big text files. It was alerts generated for just about everything. We had no central way of doing anything, and it got to the point where it was unmanageable. It became a case of needing one solution which could come in and just do everything.

The remote probes are great. We had some base core probes starting up, where they would collapse under the stress and the load. Setting up the remote probes has been great, especially the remote administration aspects of them. 

In the early days, we overloaded it a bit too much. We didn't distribute it out enough and had quite a lot of issues with it clustering, which I don't thing that we have entirely remedied now. However, its installers are quick and the web interface is exceptional. Once you get to that point, there are no problems at all.

We went direct to PRTG to buy it and implemented it ourselves.

It doesn't take long, maybe an hour, to do the setup and start receiving basic feedback on the functionality. Though, trying to get useful information, that can take a lot longer. Sometimes, there is a bit of information overload, which is not PRTG's fault. As users, you are quite eager to go scan everything and see what comes back. To really understand the information, sometimes it can takes months. However, that is not on the software.

It has saved time, because it makes it easier for us to find and identify problems. In the past, we might have gone to four or five different monitoring systems. Whereas, we now just go to one. It is one interface (webpage). We go there and find out everything that we want to know.

We paid quite a good chunk of money for it, but we don't have to pay for anything else (in terms of monitoring).

We bought a license for 4000 sensors.

We looked at the market, and it wasn't PRTG at first, which was just something we found from recommendations from other people along with a carrier that we worked with, a partner of ours, they actually used it. That was what sort of led us to it. They were using it for their end users, showing customers PRTG data files, stating, "We can give you all this information." We were like, "We want to do that as well!" So, we sort of stole it from them. 

We are extensively using its feature set, and there are a load of features in the product that which other solutions don't have.

It is abundantly helpful in bringing all our stuff in-house. Another platfrom that we use is SolarWinds Orion, which is a pure network monitoring tool. PRTG is much more reliable, easier to use, and the information is more clear and concise.

PRTG is great for everyone. It is really broad, and you can use it as intrinsically and technically as you want. At the same time, you can get some nice, clean, concise front-ends. We use it every day. We rely on it heavily and trust it. We have so many people that use it, and I receive very little complaints about it. The only problems we have: The desktop app is not great, and every now and then, we have issues with the clustering. 

PRTG has everything pretty much hammered down. They should keep releasing sensors. They also seem to be producing stuff at quite a good rate.

The product has been great, as it has really brought together all our monitoring.

We use it to monitor services, things like hardware usage and whether hard drive space is running out. We use it for quite a lot of our networking solution as well. If there's a glitch in the network, anything that's abnormal, being able to see that show up is quite good.

The historical data provided by the solution helps optimize our network performance. We can see what's going on in our network infrastructure, more so in terms of our core networking. We can see which fiber links have been used heavily and, if they are used heavily, we can introduce more links to particular buildings or particular areas. It's more around the networking that we use the historical data. 

Also, if we have any issues with particular hardware, we can monitor those. We can monitor the network on those ports and come back with any issues or see if anything is flipping out or has stopped working. It's helpful being able to see that historical data.

It makes us more proactive, as opposed to reactive, with any issues. We tend to see issues occur before anyone else even knows about them. That's really useful for us. Particularly if there's any abnormality on the network, because of the historical data, we tend to know about it. PRTG tells us about anything that's out of the ordinary, which is good.

The sensors work well.

The remote probes seem to be a little bit buggy at times. They just stop working or they say they can't communicate. What we tend to do to is install the remote app onto the servers that we use. That seems to clear it up. As long as the app is there, all the probes seem to work fine.

It would be nice if, for the maps view - what you can lay out on the screens - there were a bit more functionality. It would help to be able to add titles to the top or to be able to change text sizes. There's not much you can really do with that in terms of configuration at the moment.

The stability has been good since it went in. It's never had any issues. It has just worked. It updates itself, it's easy to manage, easy to maintain.

It's difficult for me to judge the scalability. For what we use it for - I think we've got 1,000 sensors and we use about 800 or 900 at the moment - it all runs fine. I'm sure it would scale very well if we needed it to go any further than that. But for what we use it for, it's relatively small.

We haven't used the tech support or the online resources. It has always just worked; it's always been fine.

We have a third-party we go to if we get stuck with our network and they recommended PRTG. They actually started using it to troubleshoot some issues on our site, and from that, we decided it was something we wanted, so we invested in it from that point and set it up from scratch.

There wasn't really any system downtime which factored into our decision, but there were a few performance issues which PRTG helped us to solve. That was another reason to get it put in place, long-term.

The initial setup was surprisingly easy, the way the menus are all laid out. I set it up myself and it explained what to do, where to go. There were little pop-ups on the screen saying, "This is where to go for this, that's where to go for that." It made it all really easy to do. 

Also, adding servers or switches, it was auto-discovery, so I didn't have to do any config on that. You could just let it discover everything and then delete what you don't want.

It took about two days from the time I set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure.

PRTG was recommended to us and we went with it on the free basis to start with and then we moved to the paid version, for more sensors. We haven't really compared it to anything else, because it was recommended. Overall it seems very good.

Just install it, follow the instructions, and off you go. It just seems to work.

We do use the Desktop app and it's good, it works very well. It's very similar to the web-based system. It gets a little bit annoying sometimes because there are quite a lot of pop-ups. I'm sure we could turn them off but that's not something we've looked into. I actually find myself exiting the Desktop app, just to stop the pop-ups.

I wouldn't say that it has made our IT department more cost-effective at this point because, although we pay for it and we use it, we haven't really made any changes on the network because of PRTG. I don't think we've had any cost savings anywhere.

I would rate it eight out of ten. The desktop app seems a little clunky sometimes. There are a lot of pop-ups saying things are offline when they're not necessarily. That's more due to those probes. When we install the app on the servers there're no issues there, so we can get around that.