PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We use it for network monitoring, mostly. We look at any metrics that the sensors pull back for us, such as availability, performance. We have some custom sensors for service monitoring.

The solution's historical data helps us optimize network performance. We can find issues by looking at historical data and benchmark it against what it should be.

It's given us metrics which we can then pass on to customers, availability statistics and things like that. It's really added value to the services we provide. From that point of view, it has definitely improved things.

It makes our IT department more cost-effective because we can detect failures faster, we can do something about them. We can get early warnings on things that are going to go wrong, be proactive about dealing with them, and have less downtime.

It gives us the needed feedback on our IT infrastructure, such as utilization of disks on a server. We get that information back and are able to act on it.

One of the valuable features is the diversity of metrics available to us to monitor. It's all there, it's all in the box. It's all made very easy, by virtue of it being pre-configured. You point it at the box, pull your credentials in if you need to, and off it goes and does it. A lot of solutions do that, but this just has it all in one box, which is what makes it really good.

The solution’s sensors and remote probes are great, spot on. They keep improving them. It's only a problem from time to time when old sensors get deprecated and you have to replace them with a new one, but other than that it's a very good selection.

The overall feature set is good. It's diverse, it's all there.

I don't think the Desktop app is that great. I don't like it. I would like to see cross-compatibility on different platforms. Also, the window management isn't that great, and the refresh rates aren't that great.

Their roadmap is good and the features that they're releasing are good, but our main ask is around the scalability issue that I've mentioned elsewhere in this review.

If you have enough resources the stability is fine, fairly rock-solid. We're at double the recommended capacity in terms of sensors for our instance, and it's running fine.

Scalability is the only major sticking point for me. There is a recommended number of sensors, which is around 10,000, and we're double that. We're not comfortable putting any more than that, even though the server might be able to handle it. It's already well outside the support boundaries for the solution. 

The only option we have to scale is to buy another core, which would be a separate, stand-alone instance, would not be managed through the same interface, and we would have to be looking in two different places. We love the product, but at the moment that is the main sticking point for us.

There have been no real problems with tech support. We don't really need to go to them, the product takes care of itself. When we have needed them, they have been very responsive and gotten back to us quickly.

We did have system downtown before implementing the solution, but it didn't really influence our decision to get PRTG. We needed a monitoring system anyway, by virtue of the nature of our business.

We would have been using an open-source solution before PRTG but we needed a more feature-rich product to work with, given the number of solutions we were operating.

The initial setup was very easy. There's nothing much to do, honestly. You just install the software on the core server and then you can install remote probes in any private sub-nets that you need and they will speak back to the core. It's very straightforward.

Within about a half an hour of installing it, we had information back.

We did it ourselves.

Subjectively, it probably has saved our organization money, but it would be difficult to quantify it.

We pay for a perpetual license and we have a support fee.

We've had PRTG in place for a number of years, so what we evaluated was in the early days, a lot of open-source solutions: Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti, etc. PRTG is differentiated because it caters to all platforms and endpoints, has features for Windows, and WMI sensors which aren't necessarily available out-of-the-box in the other solutions. That would have been a determining factor.

It will do the job, more than anything I can think of. It will give you really useful monitoring statistics out-of-the-box, and will give you the ability to customize and do things that aren't there by default. It will take care of all your monitoring needs, pretty much, but just be conscious of scale.

I would say PRTG is an eight out of ten. We're very happy with the functionality. Those missing two points come from the scalability issues.

We use it for monitoring items on the network: switches, servers, and other devices, to guarantee or at least monitor uptime.

It has provided us with early warning for potential issues and has stopped potential downtime before it occurs. It also reduces the amount of wasted time that comes with dealing with things after the fact, so scheduled maintenance can be more easily performed.

It provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure by telling us whether things are up, what the current usage is, and whether we need to plan to modify that. It tells us whether there are spikes in usage that either need to be addressed within the application, based on additional resourcing for the application, or at the server level.

The most valuable feature is the alerting when there's downtime. 

Also, the feature whereby it shows when my hard drives are moving towards thresholds that would be considered outages, before they reach that point - that is valuable. That's the main thing we want out of it, a warning.

The Desktop app is fine, it's easy enough to use, it installs relatively easily. It's lightweight, it sits in the corner, and it pops up if there's a real issue. I tend to use the web interface to actually do any of the work within it. But the Desktop app sits there in the background and it works fine.

The sensors are good, there's a large availability, and they provide relevant information. The way those sensors are deployed allows you to modify and tweak them, based on what you want to achieve out of them. But you can equally remove sensors with relative ease if they automatically include things that you don't want to monitor.

I would like to see Office 365 monitoring. Essentially, it doesn't do it. I assumed not at all, but apparently it does it slightly. However, due to issues with APIs, they currently don't provide full monitoring for O365. It is something they're looking into.

I've not seen any outages with it so I'd say it's stable.

It's scaled as far as we've needed it to so far and we're planning to roll it out further. It scales perfectly fine. It's pretty easy to introduce new offices. We've got it on a core set of offices at the moment, but adding additional offices as they've been deployed has been a straightforward, easy process.

I've not had to use the tech support. I do use the online resources and, from that point of view, there seems to be a reasonably extensive knowledge library that answers any questions I've had to address.

We previously used SCOM as a solution and migrated to this because the feature set is quite similar, but it cuts out a lot of the noise and the complexity of the configuration. We started looking for other solutions which would give us something that was easier to configure whilst producing the same amount of information.

The initial setup was fine. It was straightforward enough.

I didn't personally install it so it's difficult for me to say how long it took from the time it was installed until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure, but I assume it was within minutes of it actually being installed. The installation of the sensors is quite quick, so it would have been five minutes or ten minutes after installation.

We had somebody internally who had used the product previously at another company. They were able to install it due to intrinsic knowledge of the product.

It's possible that it has saved us money, but it's difficult to measure because it's a sort of intangible in terms of downtime and the cost of downtime, depending on the system.

We did look at a couple of other solutions, but partly because we had somebody with in-house knowledge of PRTG and ability in it, they essentially gave it reasonably good reviews from their personal usage. So we chose to go with something that was a known factor.

We would have looked at stuff like SolarWinds and some others, but off the top of my head, I can't remember which ones.

It is a good solution, one that is at least worth investigating.

The historical data provided by the solution would potentially help optimize network performance, but it's not something I directly look at so I can't really pass along an opinion on that.

Overall, the feature set looks good. It covers off a lot of what we're interested in.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten. It does a lot of the things that I need it to do in terms of monitoring. It provides great feedback and produces it in an easily consumable way. The caveat is that it doesn't quite cover off everything I need it to do at the moment.

It is for monitoring the up/down of our core infrastructure: Internally, the edge routers in our major occupancies, core switches, access switches, etc. It sort of give us real-time feedback for what is going on.

We use it to determine if a switch is up, our traffic is running optimally or at a normal rate.

We set up the solution, and it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure instantaneously. Because of the sensors that we are using, the graph started populating straightaway. Also, Pings and SNMPs were coming back straightaway. So, within 24 hours, we had a days worth of logs to look through.

Yesterday, we were having an issue with one of our major occupancies. We were able to quickly determine whether or not it was because of network performance. Because we could literally just look at the graph and screen on our wallboard, and say, "It wasn't because of network utilization." 

It is easy to rule things out, or say, "Because we had this huge spike it traffic, it maxed out our line. Therefore, it was a bandwidth problem."

The real-time monitoring and alerting are its most valuable features. 

Sometimes, it is difficult to drill down further to get information, e.g., if we saw spike in traffic, then we would want to drill down and find out what is causing that spike in traffic. Now, it could be because of the way we're using it, but we find that it' difficult to do, which is why we are using another product for this.

SolarWinds has server application monitors (SAMs), which we are using to check our processes on critical systems to see if they were to go down that we would get an alert for it. Because it's all network-based, it would be great if this was something that we could have included.

I have never seen it go down. I think it has only ever gone down when I have been messing with it and caused it to go down. The solution is nice and stable.

The scalability is really good. At one point, I did enable a sort of clustering and found that much easier than SolarWinds. 

SolarWinds clustering is an absolute nightmare, whereas clustering with PRTG, was ridiculously simple. In order to scale and add more load balancing, PRTG was a lot smoother and quicker to do it. 

Obviously, there are different levels. We're currently limited to 100 sensors, but if we were to purchase an enhanced version of it, we could scale to whatever we purchased.

I haven't used the technical support. I haven't needed them.

We were actually using PRTG before we were using SolarWinds. From the feature side of things, I don't think that we ever fully implemented and tested PRTG. Then, we started testing SolarWinds and found SolarWinds was giving us a more detailed reporting. So, that is the avenue we went down for actually purchasing a product. We chose SolarWinds, but we still keep a hold of PRTG for its real-time stuff.

We just installed it, then started configuring sensors. That was about it. There wasn't much to it.

We set it up in-house.

The historical data does not help us optimize our network performance, as we are not really using it to that level. We could, but because we are only on the free version, we have a limited number of sensors. Therefore, we are not monitoring as much as we want to be to obtain historical information.

We also have monitoring with SolarWinds, as well. What we find is that SolarWinds is great for reporting and delving back into logs, but PRTG is better for that instant on knowing what is going on right now.

There are quite a wide array of different sensors with PRTG. However, we are only really utilizing SNMP, Ping, and similar functions at the moment. Because our NetFlow data goes into SolarWind, we want that report inside it. We find SolarWinds better for this. Though, we know that we could do this if we wanted and put some NetFlow data into PRTG with its multiple different sensors.

We are not using the solution to its fullest capacity. At this point, I don't think we will because we are so involved with SolarWinds. We are getting out of PRTG what we want to get out of it, but we are not getting enough from it that we could ditch SolarWinds and move over to it.

For the solutions features that we are using, they are great. We have no issues with the feature set.

I don't think we've ever used the desktop app, as I didn't know there was a desktop app. We just use the web.

We use it to keep an eye on the equipment we've got out there. We've got a Citrix farm which we shut down on an evening. We have alerts to tell us if they haven't come back up.

We were blind before. We implemented PRTG to get visibility and to get alerts on when CPU is spiking or RAM is spiking. The benefits are that it keeps us proactive. It keeps us in front of any issues that might arise. For instance, if we've got ten Citrix servers on one site and a couple of those are spiking and we get an alert on it, we can just stop users from logging onto them and spin up an extra server quite quickly.

With the Citrix solution, it now gives us clear visibility if, for some reason, some of the servers haven't come up in the morning. Before the users come in, we've got the servers set to power up by Smart Scale in Citrix to be ready to be used. If they haven't come up, PRTG's telling us they haven't come up. It enables us to jump on that before the users get in. It makes sure that the users' experience is seamless, that it's the same every day. We know every single day if the servers are up or down. PRTG tells us that.

The historical data will help optimize our network performance. We're still relatively new in deploying it. It has given us indications of when CPU spikes, when the most users are on from the most sites - because we have worldwide sites. It's given us an insight into when the busy periods are.

It doesn't necessarily make us more cost-effective but it certainly makes us be on the ball. It makes us be more proactive and it makes us better. In turn that should make us more cost-effective because it allows us to focus more on projects rather than on support. We're not firefighting, we're actually in front of the fire.

It provides us with immediate feedback on our IT infrastructure and it will give us more. We've only got a little bit so far because we've only implemented it recently. We're hoping we're going to get all kinds of really cool analytics out of it.

• The alerting is the most valuable feature. 
• I also like the iPhone app. I get alerts in an email on the iPhone app.
• There are plenty of sensors for what we need. It's great.

In terms of sensors and probes, it would be really cool if PRTG had a purely Azure-based solution. We had to install a probe on one of our cloud servers and then let that probe out from there. It would be really cool if it just monitored Azure without having to install something on the device. 

It hasn't gone down so far, so all good.

It looks pretty scalable. At the moment we've just got this on one client's site; quite a big client of ours. And the plan would be to include this in our support package, so when we get new clients we'll put PRTG on their systems as well.

We've not used technical support.

We were just using the Azure monitoring because all our resources were in Azure. We knew we needed to switch because the service kept filling up in terms of space and the client was alerting us. From a service management point of view, that's horrendous. We needed to the ones alerting the client.

Once we got PRTG on, we were able to not only alert the client, but we were able to rectify the potential issue prior to it being an issue and then alert the client: "We've identified this. We've rectified it. You need to do this."

We did experience system downtime before implementing the solution, but it wasn't a driving factor in our decision to go with PRTG.

We went with it because it looked quite simple. It almost seems too simple. It gives all the information we need. It has that dashboard for alerts on one of our monitors and we get alerts whenever there's an issue. It looked really user-friendly and really simple and it did what we needed it to do. As an IT engineer, you don't really want to be spending all of your time tweaking the monitor. It needs to be a tool.

The setup was straightforward because a colleague of mine used PRTG previously. He knew how to use it and set it up. I had a look at it. I had never used PRTG, but I found it okay to set up. I did a free trial on one device to see if it worked for us and I found it okay to set up.

It took a little while, from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure, because we wanted to get the probes right. It took a little while to set it up on our terms. We didn't just flood it out there. We took our time and got it out. It was used in Azure monitoring and, even though what we were getting was rubbish, it was getting something, and we wanted to make sure we put it out right.

We went straight to PRTG.

The solution is actually costing us money. We're taking the hit on the subscription because we haven't been able to bill it to our client yet. When the contract with our client comes up for renewal, we will then factor this into the client's renewal.

It is certainly letting us, as a DevOps team, have some sleep at night. We had a few servers that were limping and we were blind to them. We'd wake up each morning wondering if there was an email or a telephone call saying a server had gone down. This just enables to not worry so much about the solution.

We've got 1,000 nodes and I believe it's a few hundred quid a month.

We did trial four solutions, including PRTG. Obviously, we were using Azure, and I can't remember the others. They may have been SolarWinds and Opsgenie but that wasn't really going to do it for us.

Get a trial set up and see what it can do. It's really intuitive. It's really straightforward. You get what you need to know out of it and the email alerts are customizable as well. All in all, it's really a positive solution. If you're looking for monitoring, then this is the one.

I don't use the Desktop app much. A colleague of mine set it up and I just focus on the alerts. From what I know, it's fine.

My overall impression of the solution's feature set is good. I'm pleased with it. It does everything we need to do. It would just be really cool if brought us straight into Azure.

I'd currently rate it an eight out of ten, purely because I'm new to it. I'm impressed with it so far. We're getting the reports. It's doing everything we need it to do. As I said, it would be really cool if we could get Azure without having to install a little piece of software.

Monitoring of all our disparate sites through a central console is our primary use case.

The historical data provided by the solution helps to optimize network performance because it gives us trends. We can look at what we're using, what our peaks are, what our lows are, to know if we can downsize our links or if we need to scale-up in the future. It gives us really good forecasting.

In addition, with the solution we're proactive now, we're not reactive. We used to wait for the users to call us with an issue. Now we have complete warning thresholds so we can fix issues before they become issues. Our users perceive it as our being able to provide a very high level of service because we're avoiding situations where they suffer downtime. It's definitely made our infrastructure more reliable from a user's perspective.

It also enables our IT department to be more cost-effective because we're not doing as much hands-on monitoring. We're able to let the system monitor things for us so we can focus on other things. We're getting more value out of our techies.

Finally, it provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. We can look at individual devices or solutions and see if we're getting throughput, and how to utilize the hours. And that informs our buying decisions. It gives us a perspective from every angle.

Speed of deployment is one of the most valuable features. It's really quick to install. You can also scan whole subnets or different networks and it comes back with a full scan of what you've got on your network.

It allows you to do different verticals. There are different ways you can monitor things with custom sensor probes. It's really adaptable to your environment.

The solutions sensors and remote probes are very good, quite thorough.

My overall impression of the solution's feature set is that it's a great product, especially the mobile app. I'm on call and I get push notifications, so it gives me a heads-up before there are any issues that get reported to me by users. It's all good.

The Desktop app is good but it can be really sluggish at times, especially when you're editing different elements. If they could speed up the way you maneuver around different OUs that would be really good. The map creator is quick blocky. It's not very user-friendly.

Also, when doing an auto-discovery, I wish that there were an approval stage. If you pick "full detail scan", it comes back with everything, and then you have to go back and delete them bit by bit. If there were an approval saying, "These are ones that are available," you just go click, click, click and be done. That would be great.

It's rock solid. We've had zero downtime with PRTG.

It's hard for me to talk about its scalability. We've got the basics, the 2,500 sensors, and that's what we use. It's fine. It has grown with our business but we've only grown marginally.

We haven't had to use technical support.

We previously used various open-source options like Nagios. They were quite limited and required specific agents being installed on all the hosts. They were slow to roll out. PRTG was a completely different ballgame. It was click and go. It was great.

The setup was super-easy. It was a simple click-and-go install, give it your basic SNMP strings and your subnet ranges, and away it goes. It took less than an hour from the time I set up the solution until it provided feedback on the IT infrastructure. It's really quick.

I did the deployment myself.

It's hard to answer definitively, but I would say it has saved money because it has avoided system downtime by enabling us to be proactive.

We had previous experience with things like HP OpenView, but it's been many years now. Our experience with it was that it was quite sluggish, very expensive. PRTG seemed to be at a very attractive price point, and its speed and the reviews we'd seen about it were really compelling.

Give the demo a go. You'll find it super-quick and you'll love the benefits of it.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It's super-easy and cost-effective.

I use PRTG because I have six clouds around the world, a mixture of our own and our customer data, so I need to know when it's all up and running and when it's dead. My team is the main point of call for all the infrastructure around the world. I get called out at all times during the night and day, including this morning at five am.

It allows me to spend less time firefighting and patching servers, and to spend more time with our customers, fixing their environments. Ironically, some of them have moved on to the monitoring tool as well. Time is the biggest thing that I have, and it's given me that back a bit. I'm no longer spending as many nights on call-outs as I used to, so for me it's been brilliant.

It also helps our IT department to be more cost-effective. Historically, people would build servers and they'd put far too much memory in them. When we would see that they're only using one percent, we'd know someone had specified far too much and been a bit cocky with what they were doing. It definitely helps to do tuning and save resources.

In terms of feedback on our IT infrastructure, it tells us when updates haven't been applied in a while, which is not a bad thing, especially with how Microsoft has been recently, breaking stuff. PRTG been great. It has let us know when a few of our SX servers have been having little issues, things you wouldn't necessarily notice under the covers unless you started hammering the system. It's definitely prevented downtime which, at the end of the day, is what we're after. It's done well.

One of its valuable features is the fact that it handles multiple operating systems. I've started moving over to Linux and away from Microsoft. Having the guys try to catch up on their Linux skills, it has been good to have a backup to make sure that we're not missing anything. It's definitely helped us a few times to make sure that stuff hasn't fallen over. And I like the fact that it tells me when things are about to fall over, which means I can preempt it and not have to wake up at three in the morning to fix it.

The Desktop app is good, although it's a bit in your face at times, but that is what you need. I normally just have it installed on a monitor in the background, so it doesn't keep flying up on my computer when I'm in the middle of an email. Other than that, it's really good.

The overall feature is set is very good. Originally, there were a few different solutions that we were looking at. I looked at the features that PRTG had and I bought it. I realized after I bought it that it could do a lot more than I wanted it to do, which was a godsend because I was looking for another bit of software to do just part of what it was doing. I managed to get a complete system. We don't use the ticketing side because we have our own ticketing from our managed services, but for other customers, big or small, I can see how it would help out massively.

It would be good if there were better graphical interfaces when you have it on multiple monitors. The way I use it is on multiple monitors so the department can see what's actually going on with the different geographies. It would make it an easier, visually, when they're working on emails or something else, to quickly work out if something is going on, without having an alarm saying that something needs doing. That's the one thing that is - I wouldn't say lacking - but the illustrations could be better for the different geographies. Because we have so many servers, things can get lost in the fog a little bit. Maybe having a better way of showing different geographies, Flash, etc., would help.

The stability has been great. It even says when to do a reboot, generally. I've only ever had a couple of issues where I've left it on for too many months without rebooting it and it's gotten its knickers in a twist, but other than that it's been absolutely fine.

The scalability is good. I know we don't push it to what it can do. The Remote Probe feature is definitely fantastic, especially with the different geographies we have. I can't really fault it too much. With the auto-updates it pushes out, it almost looks after itself.

The solution grows with our business. Having the miniature silo sites is very good. That's helped out quite a lot with keeping track of our clouds because we can have everything in a "tiered system." If we've got a customer who rings up and wants to check on something, we can easily navigate, see what's going on, do some predictive analysis, and then see if we can help the customer make their environment any better, or just make sure it doesn't blow up in the middle of the night.

We've only had to use technical support a few times, because everything's been pretty sorted. But when we have contacted them we've literally had a call back within half an hour and the problem has been fixed, or they've walked it through and told me to read the manual.

We used to use an old product called Servers Alive. It was good but very basic. It helped every once in a while, but it just didn't have anywhere near the kind of insights that you do with PRTG.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because I was getting stressed out and annoyed at the fact that I was getting called out so often, firefighting and fixing and stuff in the middle of the night, as well as doing the day job. I needed another pair of hands to be able to handle the infrastructure that was rapidly growing.

Downtime wasn't really a driving factor in our decision. We just upped and moved to the cloud. We wanted something that could keep an eye on what was going on in the back doors. That was one of the main reasons for the switch. We used to have a data center down in London, and driving down there to fix things up in the middle of the night wasn't exactly ideal. Although cloud is a little bit more expensive, regardless of what people tell you, it frees up time in the fact that you can literally rebuild stuff on the fly now, so much faster than you would if you had to procure servers. Having something keep an eye out to make sure all that is working in the background works for me.

The setup was so easy: 

• Insert IP address here. 
• Is this your password? - Yes.
• Do you have a VM server? - Actually, I do, thanks.

It then told me: "This is what you've got, and this is broken." Okay, thanks then.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure would have been about 12 hours.

I rang up and said, "I like your product," and within half an hour I had it downloaded and semi-configured and spent the next couple of days just tuning the environment. It's fantastic.

It has definitely saved the organization money. We see ROI from the fact that the company hasn't had to employ another person to back me up because I'm fixing stuff in the middle of the night. It's like having another admin there to help look at stuff.

The pricing is not too bad. It's not massively expensive, and the ability to upscale or even downscale licenses every year is brilliant for us.

I tried out a few of the free solutions, but I just couldn't get on with them. Since going with PRTG, we haven't bothered looking anywhere else because it has done whatever we've needed it to do.

Give it a try. You can do a lot with the free version that you download. But the sensors that you get with the extra packs make life so much easier because you can literally customize anything according to your whim, depending on your application or your data type. It has worked well.

In terms of the sensors and probes, there are a lot of them. It takes a while to go through them. It's probably a bit of overkill. It's a situation where if you have too many sensors running you end up knackering your network. But then again, it has the sort of metrics you're looking for. If you want to look at stuff like disk and CPU usage, or use the new stuff where it is monitoring your websites so you can pick out key elements, that's fantastic. But when it goes into bytes that the adapters are going in and out every second, that's a little bit much. Some people might want to look at that. But overall, there's so much that you can do with it. It's fantastic.

The historical data provided by the solution hasn't helped us optimize our network performance but that's because we change our infrastructure quite a lot. Historically, they would sweat the assets quite a lot, but we have moved a lot of our stuff to the cloud. So every couple of years, if we see a new operating system is out we'll migrate to it. I will have a quick look to see if there's anything that's been stolen, but we've got quite a good development team and we hope that serves us well. They're constantly upgrading it every couple of weeks, so it's always on the move. Where the solution does help is with the trends, to know what has been breaking so we can either move away from operating systems or spend a bit more money on the dev side of it to increase performance.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten because it has literally saved my bacon on numerous occasions in the middle of the night, making sure our production servers haven't gone out and caused our customers outages. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is that it's not exactly clear what some of the sensors are for, and because of the graphical interface. Other than that, as I'm using it over time, it's just getting better and better.

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.