PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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.

We use this solution for monitoring servers in our data center. It performs pretty well. 

It improves the status of my infrastructure, from networking devices to real-time machines. 

I really love the snmp library. It gives the flexibility to discover data and metrics about my interface and data server.

I would like to see a more robust platform and a new dashboard. In addition, the code is good, but it needs improvement.

The stability is OK. 

The scalability is good. You can improve a remote host or the clustering. This gives it the flexibility to monitor another infrastructure remotely.

The initial setup was simple. 

In House 

We were previously considering Nagios Core, because it is over Linux and an open source solution. However, its problem is you have to do everything from scratch.

It is important when choosing a vendor to consider the connectivity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

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

• Monitoring network
• Uptime
• Resources on servers
• Better monitor our network, local, and remote hosts, and network usage as well.

• PRTG has improved our visibility and response time to issues related to remote sites. 
• Nice product with an easy interface to use and a large variety of sensors.

• Ping monitoring
• WMI for RAM
• Hard drive space on servers
• Monitors site uptime (and notices when it is down), along with thresholds when server RAM or HD is running low, which has helped us.

Needs ability to monitor standard notification time (notify after X time). 

Web-based interface is easy to use, but it is cumbersome to make changes across several devices.

No issues.

No issues.

Tech support and sales have been great.

Setup was straightforward. It is too easy to use up sensors on fluff items (core switch, etc.).  Took effort to focus on key items, such as uptime, etc.

Did not use the vendor to setup.

Currently, we are using the free version. ROI was immediate after receiving notifications with low HD or RAM on servers.

Sensors on free version can run out quick. However, the ability to use the base version with 100 free sensors is great. The cost on other packages can be very reasonable.

It was recommended by our network engineers. Other clients use PRTG and have had a great experiences with it.

It is a good solution. We are evaluating the advanced features and client PC application monitoring.

Accessibility, ease of use (Web GUI, MobileApps). In general, compared with other software, it's easy to install/implement and build structures. It's also cost effective.

Every department in my company uses this tool for SMS or e-mail alerts regarding its devices.

Mostly, this software has sensors for devices to monitor specs and you can build or develop or modify various sensors, according to your company's needs. But you may need to do that with coding or plugins or with the support of Paessler AG, the manufacturer.

About one and a half years.

It depends on your company's IT infrastructure. Mostly security issues (firewall/proxy permissions, etc.) are the ones that could cause stability problems in my experience.

Because we are a relatively new user, I can't really comment on this.

Support is mostly done via support tickets. Nothing is perfect, I’d give them eight out of 10. They do as much as they can.

We have used SAP ITIM. We switched because PRTG is more cost effective then SAP ITIM monitoring.

Initial setup is straightforward. Not a big deal in general.

If you're looking for a cost effective software I’d suggest this product. If you have worked with/used a more professional product or need a more professional/complex product, I would not recommend this one. If you want a straightforward and easy solution, PRTG Network Monitoring is one of the best.

I was not the decision maker so no comment.

If you're looking for "easy", "simple", and "user friendly", I would recommend this product.

• Network monitoring - it's able to collect lots of detailed information on network devices and network traffic. The graphing functions allow it to view current and history of the device.
• Ease of set-up – it is quick and easy to add a probe and start collecting data from a device.

Allows us to monitor devices better, and helps up to identify issues with the monitored device using current or historical data from PRTG.

PRTG access works best from the web GUI. There are dedicated apps on Windows/Android/iOS, but they are slow and don’t work as well as the web GUI.

Licenses are very expensive, so I would like to see cheaper licensing.

Over three years.

No, it was quick and easy to set-up and deploy. But if you have lots of devices to set-up, then it can take a long time.

The only issues we had were self-inflicted. We massively exceeded the recommended number of probes on the collecting server and this caused the server to crash and stop collecting data. Once we reduced the number of probes, then the PRTG was stable.

No issues with scalability until you reach license or hardware limitations. Then you need to install new servers and have different licensing. Have a plan and idea of what you want to monitor before implementation.

Not much interaction with customer service, but whenever I did contact them they were helpful.

Technical support was responsive and helpful.

We previously used WhatsUp for network monitoring, but it was more simplistic and did not provide the depth of monitoring that PRTG did.

It was quick and easy to setup new devices.

In-house.

Figures unknown.

My advice is to be clear with what you want to monitor before you start configuring. PRTG has a large number of probes that can be used to monitor devices, so have a good plan of what you want to monitor. Otherwise it is easy to monitor devices with lots of probes and exceed license allowance or hardware limitations. PRTG licenses are expensive.

No, PRTG had already been selected as our monitoring tool.

There is a free trial installation of PRTG available, which allows monitoring with 100 probes. Install on a server to gain some experience of PRTG and learn what it can do.