PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

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.

My primary use case for the PRTG solution is network device monitoring. For example, if one of my Ubiquity access points goes down, PRTG will send an alert so that I can go and try to restart it and bring it back up before people start complaining.

This product can be improved by updating the net flow interface. The one that is in place works – I can get all the information I need from it – but it is a little bit clunky.

I have not had any problems with the stability of this solution. I have to reboot it once a year, which is a chance for me to do the updates anyway.

The scalability of this solution has gone smoothly for me so far. I am mostly using it just for pings, and because I don't have a ton of net flows going into it, I am not heavily taxing it. We have a couple of thousand devices that it i monitoring and we have had no problems.

I never had a reason to be in touch with the tech support for the solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's an application that you can run on a Windows box. I have it running on a virtual Windows server, so it's not a standalone operating system, and it can come off as an application.

PRTG is relatively intuitive and fairly straightforward. It has net flow monitoring and that works all right. I would describe it as a decent middle-of-the-road solution. It costs about $500 a year, so if you're looking just to watch basic traffic and keep an eye on devices, it works fine.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitoring a seven out of ten.

PRTG is a very versatile and flexible tool. We have a vast number of users spread over more than 300 installations in India and neighboring countries. We have many different types of customers who use this tool for project control monitoring and other types of network monitoring.

PRTG Enterprise Monitor comes with built-in analytics capability. This means that if there is an incident, it not only tells you that there is an incident, it will also tell you the root cause.  For large networks, this is beneficial as the network team can easily home onto the problem directly without spending time searching for the root cause, which allows them to attend to the problem as the alerts come in. 

Having an Alliance program is very valuable. The Paessler Uptime Alliance Program focuses on making the core network product, which is PRTG, progressively better. It also combines capabilities from any partners in the ecosystem. For example, we have UVexplorer (a US-based company), taking care of network discovery, network topology mapping, and network asset mapping and we have other partners, like CORP-IT, that provide us with the plug-in to monitor SAP and sensors. In other words, it's an ever-expanding network management system.

If you can get everything into a particular environment, you can monitor your factory automation systems; however, they also need to be monitored for maintenance purposes. If you intend to automate factory information, you cannot afford to fail. Monitoring the equipment and receiving dashboard alerts for maintenance is highly advantageous. This is a great feature of PRTG. Currently, we are competing in the market with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. They are good, but we come out winning.

From a security perspective, PRTG provides you complete Secure Socket Layer-based access. If you're monitoring your network or a private network using a BLS cloud, security is automatically ensured because of the way you're deployed.

I don't believe there is much need for improvement. The product is constantly improving. I used to think that the reporting could be quicker, but presently, there is a solution for that, thanks to the SLA plug-in from CORP-IT. The basic reason why PRTG reportings were slow is due to the fact that the reporting engine is built-in as a functionality in the PRTG application. The application does a lot of things, like monitoring and managing the database and it updates your dashboard in real-time.

The last priority goes to the reports. Typically, reporting can wait if there are demands on other aspects of the product, but because of this, the reporting was becoming too slow because it was always the last priority. I used to think that needed to be improved but the formal plug-in has solved this issue. Some customers don't mind the slow reporting, as not everything is urgent. However, if you want faster reporting, the options are available. 

Maybe in the future there will be room for improvement, but currently, there is nothing pressing that I can think of. 

I have been using this solution since 2003. Previously, I used CA, IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, and HP OpenView. 

I have not come across any situation which was so bad that PRTG has crashed.  

The stability and security of this solution are intertwined. PRTG is not static, it's always evolving and updating. Basically, the security situation at any given time makes PRTG's functionality vulnerable. Thankfully, they take this as a top priority, providing new solutions all the time. Paessler releases 7 to 8 updates a year to combat this issue. Because of this, I would say we're in lockstep with our security needs which also tie into the stability of the solution.

Presently, PRTG is extremely scalable. In fact, I would boldly say that this is the most scalable network monitoring tool that I know of. 

If you have PRTG on a single server, the server can perform many functions. PRTG has a local probe that probes according to the configuration settings; however, even the best servers cannot take on an infinite load. Thankfully, PRTG offers a remote probe as part of their license return. This has multiple advantages including lessening the load of the server.
For example, should the communication link between the remote probe and PRTG server break down, the local probe will keep on accumulating data locally. When the link to the server is established, all the collected data is then flushed into the core. That is one way of scaling, but keep in mind, that adding multiple remote probes will eventually saturate the core because now you have to manage the data from so many sensors.

 Depending on the types of sensors and monitoring frequency, as your network expands, you can keep adding PRTG digit codes. You can keep adding servers and sensors to focus on monitoring. In my opinion, I don't know of another product where you can do this. Even if you've applied PRTG on multiple servers, you can still manage all of them using a single dashboard.

The initial setup was very easy. What you pay for this product encompasses everything. When we sell this product to a customer, we say "You can do it yourself, you don't need to pay for installation". So far, at least 70% of our customers are able to manage and there are some that don't need our help at all; however, there are occasionally a few customers who email or call us looking for support, in which case, we are always quick to help at no charge. This is all included in the price you pay for this solution. There are no hidden costs and the customers appreciate this.

Downloading and installation take less than five minutes, but after downloading, there is configuration to be done. Installing the software is only one part, about 30 to 35% of the whole picture. Our networking team needs to be organized because this is how we guide our customers in the right direction before the product arrives, which saves them a lot of time. We have a network team, server team, and a storage team. They are very structured and know how to do their job well — they can install some of the largest networks in just three to four hours. In the best-case scenario, it would take them less than a week to install PRTG Excel.

We encourage our customers to use the trial version first, to build a rating. By doing so, when they are ready to purchase the full commercial license, they will be ready to be productive from day one. 

PRTG is now available as PRTG Enterprise Monitor, and the price of it varies depending on the total number of sensors the customer buys. 

PRTG is available as a service network monitoring service in the cloud, with the option of purchasing up to 1000 sensors. For small companies, it's more of a network tool because smaller organizations like to focus on their code builders. Smaller companies cannot afford or attract very technical people to monitor the network with cloud hosting. PRTG can fix that, but it's only good for small workloads.

The process of network management itself has to be organized. You have to organize yourselves in terms of how your network is structured: how do you want to monitor and manage it? Even that has to be organized as well. For example, if there is a problem with the database, PRTG should be able to alert the data administrators, not anybody else. Only they should take care of any pressing issues; if they don't, the method will go to the wrong person, which can be very damaging. There is a lot of human organization required in administering a method between technologies and that needs to be organized well for the network monitoring process to be effective.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine because everything has room for improvement. 

Our use case is limited.

It does what we need it to do in terms of learning.

I like the mobility of the PRTG Network Monitor and ITOps Dashboard.

Our biggest issue, and the reason we are trying to move away from PRTG, is that it is not scalable across an enterprise solution.

The scalability of this solution could improve as well as the automated provisioning of the infrastructure.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor off and on for approximately ten years.

I don't recall the version that we are working with but we recently upgraded it.

PRTG Network Monitor is a stable solution. I would rate the stability of PRTG Network Monitor a ten out of ten.

The scalability could be improved.

When we first started using it, we had four hundred different resources. Now we have four or five thousand different resources, it is not a scalable solution that automatically correctly adds devices where they belong, they are added to the end of the filter. They don't monitor appropriately; it's highly manual in terms of what and how it monitors.

We don't use their technical support. I would rate them a five out of ten.

It's a complex environment. The initial setup was just as complex.

I have not seen a return on investment.

Pricing is comparable. 

I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

Check the size of your infrastructure. If you have more than a thousand units or thousand devices to monitor, you should choose a better solution.

In my environment, I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a four out of ten.

PRTG Network Monitor is used to monitor internal network infrastructure servers. We use the solution to check to see if our equipment is up or down. 

The solution has helped our organization with proactive monitoring. It has made our infrastructure more reliable.

PRTG is a very flexible tool. The most valuable feature of this product is ping testing.

PRTG would be improved if it required less memory to run.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for five years.

This solution is stable. However, it does require a significant amount of memory to run.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable because you can offload the work to remote probes. We have 150 users in our company.

One person was required to deploy and maintain the solution.

I would recommend to anyone that is thinking of implementing this solution into their organization that they start out small and use the free version, or the 500 sensor. 

This product is a good solution, overall I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We are working with a web version of PRTG Network Monitor.

I use PRTG Network Monitor for the monitoring of all my switches and backbone infrastructure in my hotels. This includes my remote sites and for the monitoring and notification of our business lines in our hotels and traffic monitoring.

The most valuable features of PRTG Network Monitor are the threshold notification when certain traffic increases and goes beyond the defined threshold. The up and down status email notifications and other notifications are useful. Additionally, it is user-friendly, and customizable, and there are many features available.

When using PRTG Network Monitor it is beneficial if you have prior experience with it, the user interface could improve.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for approximately six years.

The stability of PRTG Network Monitor is good.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable and easy to scale.

We have a lot of viewers using PRTG Network Monitor but we only have approximately four administrators using it.

I have not contacted technical support. We did at some point have technical issues but the online technical documentation is rich, and we never had to call for support.

I have not used any other solution other than PRTG Network Monitor.

The initial setup of PRTG Network Monitor is straightforward. The setup is very dynamic and took us approximately one month to have some data, and devices in it. We referred to a lot of documentation that was very helpful.

We were not very fluent in the software. 

I rate the initial setup of PRTG Network Monitor approximately three out of five.

The deployment of the PRTG Network Monitor was done in-house.

There is not a lot of maintenance. We do regular updates and we do add quite a lot of devices on a regular basis.

We have received a return on investment using PRTG Network Monitor. We're able to do proactive support to tackle an issue before it collapses. There is a return on investment, but it's something quite hard to explain to non-IT personnel.

We have unlimited devices and sensors, and it is a bit pricey, but we do have unlimited sensors. With all things considered the price is fine, related to the solution itself. PRTG Network Monitor is good value for money.

I rate the price of PRTG Network Monitor a four out of five.

A price decrease would be welcomed by the financial and accounts departments.

We did not evaluate other options.

I would recommend PRTG Network Monitor to others and the main reason would be to have visibility of the traffic from all the lines. For example, the visibility on the status of devices, up or down, threshold configuring, and notification of capacity being overused on the line before they collapse. We are able to take action with the suppliers and with service providers before the service gets interrupted.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten.

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.

We primarily use the solution for applicative monitoring, or network and applicative monitoring for some customers so that they can make sure that all equipment is up, and sometimes we use it to look for some more accurate sensors.

Ergonomy is very useful to us. It was really easy to use. It's not really a feature, however, ergonomy and the way I could very simply makeup, let's say, basic monitoring, and then go much deeper when there is a need is helpful. 

The alerts are very helpful to have access to. 

The possibility to make maps is very valuable.

The initial setup is very simple.

So far, we've found the solution to be quite stable.

I don't really have opinions on what types of features should be added. I haven't seen anything really lacking.

The possibility to export the part of the sensor we made would be helpful. For instance, if you're doing monitoring for customers and we want to share this with them or bring them an on-premises tool as well for them, you can't export just one part. You have got to rebuild everything. Just to remake it on another premise, you've got to rebuild it from scratch.

I've been using the solution for three years at this point.

The stability is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance is reliable.

There are about 20 users handling this product.

We haven't really attempted to scale it in any way. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult the solution would be to expand.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We've been quite satisfied with the level of service we receive. We've found them to be very helpful and responsive when we have queries.

We are looking to take on other products. We are expanding, we are trying to share the two with other departments. As it often happens, the other departments say, "Well, why did you choose this and not something else?" And not
this or that?" Currently, we're looking into potential replacements.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not a complex process. A company shouldn't have too much trouble with the implementation process.

I can't say how long the deployment took. I can't recall the exact amount of time.

For maintenance, we update the solution regularly. That's handled internally by our team.

While the setup was handled internally, for the sensors, sometimes we had to reach out to the help desk for assistance. However, we did not use an integrator or consultant for the process.

I'm not an expert on pricing, however, I would describe the pricing as pretty cheap. It's not overly expensive.

I'm paying something like €1000 per year for the maintenance. I've got unlimited sensors.

Three years ago when we took PRTG, we had a trainee make a small inquiry and we concluded that regarding the needs we have today, PRTG was the best solution. We concluded at the time that it would be much easier to use. The technical gap between PRTG and the other solutions would not be relevant to how we planned to use it.

We're just a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with PRTG.

We're currently using the latest version of the solution.

Im not a network specialist, bu5 I would recommend PRTG. We've been extremely satisfied with its capabilities overall. I would rate it at a nine out of ten.