PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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.

The features which I believe to be the most valuable for PRTG are its easy setup in general, including its alarm setup; along with its out-of-the-box monitoring checks.

The fact that it's simple to use network-based monitoring, and at the same time is reliable and robust.

This product in particular provided network traffic control, net SLA measurements which are always quite practical. Also, it allowed us to report downtime on sites in a very easy and comprehensive way.

Its most important quality, in my opinion, is that it's an out-of-the-box functional product. This means you won't need a lot of technical know-how to properly make it function, at least on a basic level. It's easy to configure and make an operator know how to interpret the information gathered and apply the information it reports.

They could improve on application monitoring, user defined OS sensors, its lack of agent defined monitoring. Also, they could include customized reports and network maps, more detailed SLA reports, better item relations. Lastly, they should improve on distributed monitoring for customers on remote networks.

What it offers is far from being enough. It's dashboards, GUI and reports are too simple for cases where you'd need advanced monitoring tools.

I've used it on two different sites for over three years.

None at all, I'd even say that it's the best thing about this program: you don't need to know about monitoring to make it run.

We've had no issues with the stability.

It does consume a lot of hardware resources, and over time you can notice it going slower. This is especially so when you've added/erased a large amount of checks, alerts or customizations from what are called "sensors" . Just like many Windows-oriented tools, you sometimes feel the urge of just resetting everything and starting over -but that's mainly because of how it handles during daily tasks- usually it doesn't have major issues with bugs or general usefulness.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I've worked with a large variety of solutions, mainly Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti and Pandora FMS. In this case I resorted to PRTG because the client already had a license for it. One of the times I had to set it up from scratch and the other time I had to take over an installation which was already functioning.

It was quite simple although, as always, you have to get used to the terminology used which is unofficial.

In both cases I had an In-house team.

It was quite good, considering the product is inexpensive for commercial standards and that it won't take a long time to learn to use properly.

It's a good product for simple environments, but its price/feature ratio scales rapidly in larger environments. In really complex or large environments, this product just isn't enough, it's lacking a lot of features that would otherwise be necessary for these types of environments.

generally work with open source solutions such as Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti or Pandora FMS. In this case it could be compared to WhatsApp Gold, but I think PRTG is more useful for compact and simple environments.

I would say that in general it's good software, yet I would advise newcomers about some of its limited features, but you can't really expect pinecones from a palm tree, if you know what I mean.

If you need a simple and solid tool, and you're willing to spend a buck, it's a good option to consider. It's a tool that's been tested and you can easily see what it is or is not meant for.

Easy to setup, many avaliable sensors, easy import of MIB, cheap

We can monitor everything from one place and get email or SMS notifications.

We are monitoring QoS for site-to-site VPNs.

Creating maps

3 years

Deployment is straightforward.

From time to time, you need to reboot the PRTG probe server.

No, you can add more probes very easily even from prtg web console.

7/10, main issue is that the company is in Germany and their support works during Europe business hours.

I used Solarwinds, to set it up and tweek took a very long time, and very expensive compare to PRTG.

You will not find anything cheaper that really does the job.

Bandwidth graph and Layouts

Map designer could be improved by adding more flexibility to the links instead of the straight line.

No

No

No

Previous solutions had to many dependencies and were unstable for the most part. Overhead and additional cost of critical features were costly.

Initial setup is as easy as it will get for a software of this type. The entire application core and probe literally install and run in less than 5 minutes. I am used to having dependencies and multiple modules taking over an hour to fully install for similar product.

SolarWinds, WhatsUp, OpenNMS, Nagios, Netcool, OPManager, Splunk

This is a review of PRTG version 14. As far as network monitoring and analysis, I cannot think of a more intuitive and flexible product on the market today. Where PRTG shines is in its speed and compact design. The latest interface is ideal for complex networks and as useful for simple networks. Initially, I had a negative reaction to the idea of the sensor based license approach. Once I deployed PRTG on the network, the sensor model makes perfect sense. For the amount of sensors that I used and the included features, the cost of PRTG is over 80% lower than other software suites that claim to have similar features. I am not an employee of PRTG, I am just a very satisfied user. If you are a sysadmin or netadmin and have been struggling to find the ideal monitoring tool, I urge you to give PRTG a try. The trial is free. You will not regret it. I just wish someone had told me about this application a few years ago.