PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

I look after the infrastructure side of Lookers. We have 8000 users, 400 various servers, and 190 sites. We've been rolling the product out and are relying on the infrastructure purely for the whole of our business.

We've managed to cut down on our P1 escalations by around about 70 percent. We have 24/7 monitoring and the notifications are great.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. We tend to keep about 100 days worth of logs. Therefore, we can create patterns in terms of load against different times, and downtime, as well. When housekeeping jobs are run, then we get periods where resources are tested and high. So, it's a case for us we're able to use scalability, across Azure and AWS for Elastic. Thus, it's helped us in terms of planning our actual infrastructure against performance and things.

This solution provide us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure for management reporting. Stats-wise, we're able to get reporting out-of-the-box from PRTG. For our executive board, we're able to provide valid stats of what we are saving in terms of revenue in regards to the infrastructure of our business.

It is a central solution in terms of how to actually use it. It has a very easy dashboard. Everything is concise. We are able to create custom sensors. For different parts of the business, we have many products across many environments, and it works for everything.

It is very broad in regards to what it can actually cover. We look after corporate environments for websites and SQL Server, and it's just a one stop solution for us. It also works well out-of-the-box.

The remote probes are great because they lessen the load across to the main server. The probes work really well, and we have probably about 15 of them now across all our environments, which definitely increases performance.

Sensors are out-of-the-box and provide some good coverage, but we have a lot of custom sensors, as well. With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied.

Less than one year.

The solution is very stable. We get monthly patches which are released by Paessler. We actually have a change window where we put those in place. We have around 98 percent uptime. Whenever we've had any downtime, it's usually our own infrastructure which causes it.

We have a clustered environment using sort of a DR scenario across our data centers in Manchester and Belfast. So, when one is down, the other up.

At the moment, we have a limit of 10,000 sensors. That is the supported level, in terms of the license that we have. While we can increase that, it's at our own risk. After that, the product is not supported in terms of the extra sensors that we put in. Therefore, it is a case of how we use the actual load on the software ourselves.

So, we have the maximum license of 10,000 sensors, but we could do more.

10,000 sensors can be exceeded but it is not best practice. 

The technical support has been very good. Initially, when we did the setup, we called on support quite a bit. With NetFlow, which is the firewall monitoring, there was a lot to get into place and getting it visible within PRTG, but the support was a great help.

We used a product called SolarWinds in the past, and its cost was high. Whereas, PRTG came in at a third of SolarWind's cost. 

SolarWinds was limited in terms of its support, as it was agent-driven, so each device had to have an agent installed. Whereas, with PRTG, it just listens via SNMP; nothing needs to be installed on the product. This was a big thing for us in terms of supporting and maintaining it.

We used to have a lot of downtime and have definitely been able to improve that.

Because we had no training, there was a sort of a steep learning curve, but we managed to get through it.

It took three months from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure.

We did the deployment in-house.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. For on call call outs, it helps with downtime, primarily. We're a retail business, so time is cost for us, and downtime is lost revenue. So we've able to reduce the amount of downtime that we used to have. We cover over 190 car dealerships around the country, and if an email goes down or the Internet goes down, we're able to combat that now ahead of time.

Cost was a factor when selecting this solution, but it just did everything we wanted it to do. The key thing was having it agentless, so we didn't have to maintain the local nodes.

Our licensing costs are 10,000 euros over three years. We've a three year contract with that, then we will just maintain it on a yearly basis.

SolarWinds was something that we re-evaluated. We were also using ManageEngine and Zabbix.

I came on board when we were downloading an evaluation of the actual software. We were doing our due diligence across other platforms/software, and PRTG came out top. 

Part of the pilot phase was to see how much load it would have on our network, and if there would be any sort of bottlenecks. We have been pretty happy with it. It has not had any sort of flow back on us, as a business.

It is a one stop solution for us. It covers all aspects of the business that we need for principal monitoring. Obviously, depending on the organization, it won't work for everyone. Some companies may have more locked down network rules. For companies like ours, in terms of a one stop solution across all of the environments, I would definitely recommend it.

The desktop app is something that is not been used that much because we tend to use the web UI. As the main infrastructure team, we do use the desktop, but we prefer the web UI.

PRTG has been a network monitoring solution for our company for over five years now. We constantly monitor our servers, switches, broadband. Anything that we can put a sensor on, it monitors. I monitor four domains and I use cross-domain network monitoring as well.

In terms of the historical data provided by the solution, I look at the network performance and, obviously, if I've got an offsite backup going through, I want to monitor what sort of impact that's had on the network. If it's detrimental, then I can change the times when the backups happen and make sure that there's not a severe impact on my local network.

Previously, other parts of the company have used different products, and PRTG has helped broaden their minds into what a decent piece of monitoring software actually does. I'm pushing it out further afield, which is why it's in four domains.

When it comes to helping our IT department to be more cost-effective, if I've got as-it-happens monitoring, I can deploy the resources to resolve the issues quicker.

One of the things I like is the fact that I can use it on my mobile phone. I use the mobile app and it alerts me if there is a problem. Obviously if I'm not in the office or available to get in. I can monitor it externally and am able to deploy resources to sort things out quickly.

The fact that I can use custom MIB files to customize my sensors for the things that are not there as a default is a good feature as well.

I use the Desktop app all the time, it's constantly on my taskbar so that I can monitor things. If there is a problem, it flashes up red and lets me know there's an issue and I get to deal with it almost immediately.

The remote probes are okay. I think that there could be more sensors available, especially with newer technologies coming along. It has been a bit stagnant. Unfortunately, it uses an almost "external workforce" through its forums to create new sensors.

Also, I have an issue with DFS, distributed file services. Currently, although there is a forum post with regards to the issue of PRTG and the DFS monitoring, there isn't one by default. I think it is quite a necessity that they make one, one that's actually easily integratable. Taking into account the difference between DFS and DFSR as well would be great. They need one that pulls up the report, shows you how much is out of sync, if it's out, and how much of a time difference there is between the synchronizations. Anything like that would be a help.

It's always on. I have a server dedicated to it, that's all it does. I've never had it fall down, ever.

With the remote probes, the ability to monitor external domains makes this product easy to scale.

I've only used the technical support a couple of times. There is a lot of information available on the forums. More than likely, if I have a problem, somebody else has had that same problem. The forums can help in that way to find a resolution.

Setup, is fairly straight-forward, but it can be a laborious task initially, once you have populated the sensors everything just ticks along nicely.

In-House setup but if there's a problem, I know that the support from PRTG is not far away.

The solution has definitely saved us time and money. Services need to be constantly monitored, if you don't have a good product to monitor these things you have to wait till something stops working and then use command-line tools to diagnose the issue. This is counter-productive.

Mostly I know if a DC is starting to go down because it stops responding to remote desktop session calls. I don't know why, but that's the first thing that goes down. It flags up that I can't get the user remote desktop and that's the first sign that that server is going to go down very soon.

At the moment I'm only using 500 sensors. I pay yearly, so it's a cost that's easily swallowed.

I have actually used other solutions, because I do look after four domains. Previously, they had other packages that were already there, and I still find PRTG to be the best.

PRTG is free for an initial trial of 30 days. Once you've used it, I think you'll find that it is a great product and well worth the investment.

The overall feature set is pretty good. It's not a complete feature set. I'd like to see more, but, as a general rule, I've been using it for over five years. I must be pretty happy with what it does, as it is.

I would rate the product at eight out of ten because there's always room for improvement. Nobody's going to be the best of the best. If a DFSR or DFS sensor were added, I'd give it a nine.

The primary use case is for monitoring infrastructure: servers, printers, endpoints, and certain services on certain systems. We are alerted in regards to any issue with them.

The remote probes are absolutely fine. They allow us to connect from sites. We have a few different sites spaced across the UK. The remote probes serve a purpose, like separating stuff logically, which is handy. 

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. Though, we had a few issues with a specific performance, we managed to pin it down because it wasn't throttling in any way. Seeing the history six months ago compared to what it was six months down the line, where there have been more computers put on the site, we could start slowly seeing the bandwidth increase. Then, we were able to identify what the issue is, and resolve it.

In general, we can see trends for a lot of different things, such as hard drive space and bandwidth usage. We can see and plan for the future by knowing, "We're sort of at 75% capacity now. In three months time, we know we're going to be up to 90%,so we need to plan ahead for it, getting upgrades booked in place." Since things like this take time and effort, it's handy to see trends into the future of where our company is going.

The nitty-gritty that you can get down to in terms of monitoring individual things. While seeing if the service or hard drives have halfway fallen out is fine, being able to monitor stuff with custom scripts (such as SQL scripts) and know whether your data warehouse is built in the morning, this is something which ticks all the boxes for us.

The sensors work as they should. There are hundreds of thousands of them with custom scripts that you can put out there to do different things, like file counts, monitoring SQL Server databases, and specific entries. There are a plethora of sensors out there that are really cool.

It gives us feedback on our servers. For example, we've an ERP server which we monitor for certain files, and it allows us to go back and see that we had an influx around dinnertime or lunchtime of a certain number of files, so this was a busy period. It also provides us the feedback to go back to the business, and say, "This is a busy period of the day for us. Are there any resources that we need to ramp up during that time?"

I would like a live chat solution. This would be useful and handy, especially with the ability to provide logs and an overview of what we are doing at that moment in time to get answers to our questions. 

The setup aspect of it  and getting devices working needs improvement. The reliance between different devices, so if one device goes down on Ping, the whole network will go down if the roots goes down. So, the time it takes to set that up is a bit more than I would have liked and is a bit cumbersome to actually go through. That's the only side that I can see a bit of improvement on. Some sort of relationship between devices, making that a bit easier to see what would be useful.

The stability is absolutely spot on, in terms that it will never go down. 

The only sort of limitation is the actual probes. So, if you don't have enough probes on there, you can over flip them and cause the WMI sensors and SNMP sensors to sort of overload. Sometimes, they might timeout for a minute, but they do come back. 

We have close to a 1000 sensors on it. I'm sure there are other people out there with a lot more sensors with bigger infrastructures than us. It performs absolutely fine if you have a site which has got a 1000 sensors on it. 

We can just add another probe onto another server on the site and extend that by doubling up the capacity on it. So, it can go as large as we want it to.

The technical support is very interactive. They've invited us to go down to the computer museum down in Milton Keynes, where they run trips. You can go down, they put on lunch, then have Q&A and a bit of a demo. They're very interactive people. They have active forums, as well. If you ask a question, it's not just the employees who will answer. Other key users like to get into the nitty-gritty stuff, which is really good.

We had sort of massive bandwidth bottlenecks, where our sites used VoIP telephonics. So, when something was throttling the bandwidth for one site, they wouldn't be able to make telephone calls. We had a few instances of that before we got the PRTG product in place.

We knew we need to invest in a new solution because of the amount of time that we were spending manually checking if devices were up or not, then troubleshooting those instances, and where devices went down. We realized that we could have seen these a lot earlier and spent a lot less time on them, thus allowing us to have more time to spend doing actual project work rather than dealing with the break/fix side of things.

The initial setup is as straightforward as you want to make it. You will get out of it the time that you've put into it. It's absolutely fine and straightforward to the point. It's only when you go into more specific stuff, like custom sensors, then you might need a little technical support, but they are always there to help.

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

We used a reseller to purchase it. However, we just sort of integrated it ourselves.

We have gotten weeks and hours back from using the product.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The time that you spend looking at stuff and monitoring services for updates, PRTG notifies you when stuff needs to be done. You could spend eight hours a week looking at stuff manually or you could just wait for PRTG to email you. Once you put in a couple of hours setting it up, it will just notify you to the business critical stuff, allowing you to plan ahead for your next week or month.

While I am not the person who deals with pricing, I would say that we pay around 1000 pounds a year.

We looked at PRTG and SolarWinds. From a cost side perspective, compared to PRTG, and from what you get back from it, PRTG was sort of a hands down the winner. We had read a few different reviews of PRTG and had a few of the colleagues that we'd worked with in the past who now used it at their new businesses and recommending it. These were sort of the main driving factors for going down that route.

Spend your time looking into PRTG and give it a trial. They're more than happy to give you a trial license for 30 days or so. Get it up and running on a certain site or system that you want to monitor just to see what you think of it. 

It is a very in-depth solution. You have to take the time to get it up and running the way you want. If you want it to be the best monitoring system, you have to put the time into it, such as creating a reliance on other sensors. E.g., if a ping sensor goes down, you're not going to get a response from the other sensors 99% of the time if the device isn't working.

They've spent a good amount of time refining and turning it into a really robust product.

We don't use the desktop app. We just use the web browser.

We use PRTG to monitor all of our business critical and distributed systems around the areas that we operate in the UK. This is ensure they have good system uptime and can demonstrate against SLAs.

The historical data provided by the solution is one of the main reasons why we went with PRTG. It gives you that granular view to be able to go back 24 hours, two days, a month, or year. You can start building powerful data patterns with this technology platform.

One of the things which became apparent was that we didn't know when things were going down out of hours unless somebody sat and was there watching the consoles. Nobody knew when things were going down. Now, one of the things that we've noticed is we are picking up when we are having out of hours outages. The solution is starting to correlate data so we can speak to the relative representatives and make sure the outages stop happening.

The solution provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It gives us really good quality of service when it comes to monitoring of available space and available resources. It allows us to preempt issues before they become a problem for the business.

It is easy to use and intuitive, which is really important. It does what it says on the box by giving you a visual of the state of what is going on at any one time. 

The feature set does what it says on the box. It does the monitoring well. It doesn't try to do anything which it is not supposed to. It does what it does well.

There is a good selection of sensors and probes in it.

While the web application side of things is fantastic, the desktop app is the one area where it do with some improvement. From a user's perspective, I would like to be able to get more out of the desktop offering as opposed to where we are now with it. It could be stronger. There are opportunities there that you don't have with the web-based application to do some interesting and innovative stuff.

An important thing is to keep up with the technology which is now coming out. There is obviously a lot of generic stuff in the solution, and there is also a lot of new tech which is coming out that people need to be able to monitor.

We have had no issues. It just works and is up 24/7/365. Every update which comes out is rock solid.

We are a fairly large implantation, as we have currently 2500 nodes. We are just about to double that. The solution allows you to keep on doubling and doubling, as much as you need. The only restriction is the platform that you put it on. When you get into those larger areas, from what I understand, the performance on PRTG is just as good as it is on the smaller implementations.

We have contacted their tech support a few times, which is really good. They got back to us very quickly with a good level of technical knowledge.

The previous solution that we had (SolarWinds) was giving us a lot of false positives. We were spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. We had used PRTG before, and it has always been a solid platform. 

We were experiencing network and system downtime before implementing PRTG. This was that a driving factor to switch solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. Within a half an hour, we had it set up and running. The setup is intuitive and the install is very much wizard-driven. There is no real agenda behind it. It is very much just click and go once you have finished your scanning, then it works straightaway.

It took two to three hours from the time that we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. It was very quick.

We used a reseller (Axis) for the deployment, and our experience with them was really good.

The solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. It cuts down on downtime. This means we are not chasing after things that we don't need to chase. It is bringing to our attention the operational problems that we have, so we can focus our attention on those, instead of running around trying to figure out what the problem is.

It is constantly ensuring our systems are up and running. They are in a solid position. If you look at the costs attributed to downtime, those have been removed.

It is about £4,500 for the first year, then about another 15 to 20 percent annually after that. So, we are looking at about £1000 running costs a year. When you think about how much an outage costs per minute, it's negligible.

We just considered PRTG when moving away from SolarWinds.

Look at what it is you want your organization to be able to do and what it is you need to monitor. Then, concentrate on the key elements first. Don't try and overcloud what you're trying to do. Start with your core stuff and work outwards, then you will always get a good solid solution.

It is a really good, solid product, which does exactly what we need it to do.

We use it to monitor our critical infrastructure, i.e., the services our users depend on. It is very useful for us to have that holistic view, e.g, one single view of the dashboards. The product is a useful kit to summarize the health of our infrastructure.

It has made us more proactive. Instead of waiting for the users to report failures to us, we can very quickly see things on a nice, easy dashboard and respond to it quickly enough. Then, hopefully, we can avoid having an issue experienced by the end user. 

We can use the data which comes out of PRTG to look at capacity and plan to grow particular areas of the business. It provides statistics about application or service, monitoring both of endpoints of that service. Therefore, we can look at the middle, and say, "How many people are actually using this?" We use the traffic statistics and other things from PRTG to help us predict growth and more.

The dashboarding is simple to use. We have one of the full dashboards, which is shaped like a donut. We call it the donut doom. If we ever see red on the donut doom, we know we need to respond quickly. It's a good, solid dashboard, which is really good for us.

There is a simplicity to setting up the extra sensors. It's really easy for us to build infrastructure and start monitoring very quickly.

The sensors are very simple to use and quick to deploy. I love once the credentials are added at the higher level that we can simply ignore the credential side of things and not to worry about them. You put them in at the top, then they filter down through to all of the various platforms.

We use the remote probes a lot for our branch offices. Instead of deploying the full instance of PRTG, we'll put a remote probe out there. This simplifies the whole deployment for us.

We use a lot of NetFlow sensors for our network equipment. Those NetFlow sensors help us to determine how much of our pipe is being used for particular applications. We use this quite a lot.

The feature set is brilliant. It does everything that we need it to do. If it doesn't, then there is a nice forum that we can jump on. 

We would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us.

I've never had to play around too much with stability. We installed it on the server, put the certificate in, got our URL, and put the DNS record in, then it just does its thing. 

Once you start going above 5000 sensors, things do start to get a bit shaky. There are some best practice out there that you will need to adopt and be aware of.

PRTG has a clustering service, which is useful. We have had a bit of an issue with the WMI at one point where we just had too many WMI queries, but when we just swapped them to different sensor types, it become more efficient. This is not really a negative on scalability as much as ensuring to follow best practices.

The solution can grow with our business. If we need to expand the number of sensors that we are using or expand the number of remote offices that we have, we set up the remote probes with standard templates for sensors or services, and it works.

The tech support has been fine. I haven't had any issues with the tech support at all. They tend to say, "You need to read this part of the manual." 

Generally, it's not the solution or the products in the role area. It's normally the way it's being deployed, the way it's being used, or if you're vastly oversubscribing certain areas of the system. It's just about knowing and being familiar with the system, then you don't have to really talk to tech support.

Nine times out of ten, someone else will have already asked the same question on the PRTG forum as us. 

We implemented the free solution in this company, but it is what I was familiar with. I have used the solution in previous companies before. We did have another monitoring solution, but the speed in which we could get the solution running and my familiarity with it was really helpful.

It was also very easy to take my colleagues through it in the new company in which I was joining. Everyone was quickly on board with it, and we used it as an extra in-depth monitoring on top of our other monitoring stuff.

We experienced network and system downtime before implementing this solution. It was a driving factor in the decision to implement this solution. We had a lot of issues with disk space utilization. We are a quite big company, so we have a lot of people with a lot of files flowing around. We needed an extra level of monitoring on our disks and services.

The initial setup was great and straightforward. Deployment was quick and painless. It just worked out-of-the-box. We were quite surprised that we really didn't have to do much tweaking for it.

Once the services started running, It immediately (within an hour) started monitoring the probe health first. Therefore, we received immediate feedback about the infrastructure that is supporting the service. 

We did everything in-house.

We pay nothing for it. Its 100 sensors have allowed us to put a magnifying glass on some systems, providing an extra layer of detail. Therefore, our outgoing is nothing and our incoming is a lot of useful data that we can react to proactively.

This solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost-effective. We can predict a lot of failures and schedule work a lot more effectively. This means we don't need as many people. When you don't know what's going on under the hood, you're always expecting things to go wrong. Then, you have extra staff around to make sure if things do go wrong, you can fix them quickly. 

In my company now, we are using the free version. 

In previous companies, we have had unlimited licenses and going beyond 10,000 sensors with 50 different branch offices.

Primarily, we use PRTG because I am familiar with it. We have licenses for SCOM, but the complexity in setting up that type of solution put us off. It is very much a big beast of a solution. We needed something quick and simple that we could just throw in and get some good figures out of it quickly.

Take a couple of hours in an afternoon and deploy the free version. See what type of sensors are out there, then give it a go. You will find very quickly that it's quite a simple system to use. It doesn't take a lot of time or expertise to set it up and get some good data out of it.

We haven't really used the desktop app. We normally use the central server, then we have the monitoring setup in such a way that we don't need to deploy any extra elements. It just monitors things via the SNMP or WMI. We tend to use the web browser a lot. 

We use it to manage customers and to keep an eye on when stuff goes down or when stuff is not working as intended. We monitor mostly servers, but we use it to monitor websites and some of the network infrastructure as well.

With the monitoring, certainly for some of our customers that are hosting websites, we've added in PRTG's advanced http sensors, to provide them site monitoring in addition to the server monitoring which we were doing. We can pass the information on to them when they have issues, as opposed to them not knowing until one of their customers contacts them.

I would say the solution makes our IT department more cost-effective because it allows us to respond to things a lot quicker. We can get an idea of where a problem lies in the server, if it's hardware. It saves a bit of time of trying to track down a problem.

It also tells us when we're running into problems with certain bits of infrastructure that we're monitoring.

• It's really easy to use.
• You can see as soon as there is a problem and you can track it down pretty quickly.
• You don't have to go through loads of options to find when something goes wrong.

It's very easy to manage when you've got time to do some work on it: things like adding devices, adding groups, adding sensor clusters, and being able to clone and move stuff around.

I really like the Desktop app. I'm not a big fan of the web app because I've had some browser issues with it. Since finding the desktop app, I have used that exclusively.

Thinking about the overall feature set, I've had no problems with the features that I use. It hasn't happened that I've thought, "I wish I could do this," without being able to usually find an option to do it. Among those options are things like multiple users, different types of reporting, and different actions that occur after a sensor starts. There's always been something in there. I wanted it to auto-confirm when an error does come up in the test lab and, on PRTG's website, they had an API string to do that. Everything that I've needed to do, I've been able to find in the program or on their website.

It has to be installed on a Windows machine. We'd prefer it if we could install the actual control panel on a Linux.

In addition, I wouldn't mind better categories for the sensors. When I go to add a new sensor for a new device, there are some categories in there already, and they can be filtered out, but there's quite a large pool of sensors. That's one thing that I always struggle with. When I want to go in and find something quite specific, I have got to scroll down and scroll down to find what I'm actually looking for, if I want something that I may not have used before. 

With their "recommend sensors" feature, I wouldn't mind seeing that being a bit more able to scan the device that it goes on, as it doesn't necessarily pick up everything that is on there, as it should.

It's rock solid. We restart it, and the Windows machine it sits on, once a month because it's recommended to do so, to update it. We have not had any issues with it going down or not working as intended.

We've been able to scale it up as we've brought more and more customers on. Having a sensor pool which we can dip into and use has been good. If we brought on five or ten customers, we could scale it up quite quickly with cloning and copying of templates.

We started off using open source, Nagios/Cacti-type monitoring software utilities. Yes, they're open source and they don't cost you anything, but adding devices is quite cumbersome, the management is quite difficult, and the training is more difficult. Whereas, the UI of PRTG is much easier to use; much more intuitive. 

Everybody generally starts off open-source, something that won't cost you much, but they soon realize the limits of open-source. PRTG is a company that has invested a lot of time and effort building it to make easy to use, to give it a nice UI, and to make it as responsive as it is. It's just a natural progression.

The driving factor in the decision wasn't that we experienced system downtime, it was the fact that we needed something more enterprise-oriented and something that was easier to use and manage, which PRTG is, compared to Nagios. When something like Nagios breaks, it's quite difficult to get it working again, whereas with PRTG, once you buy a block of sensors you get some support for 12 or 24 months, and you've got somebody to fall back on if you ever need it.

It was already in place when I started with the company. We've moved it across to another system and I've re-set that up and it was just a matter of installing it, setting it up. It was fine, no problems. The usual control-panel install wizard made it very easy to import our old data from our previous install into it as well.

It took about 15 to 20 minutes, from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on the IT infrastructure. That was after we imported all the other data into it.

ROI is hard to measure on something like this. It has helped us out in identifying problems that are likely to happen or that are about to happen or even when they happen. We get notified as quickly as possible. To measure the ROI on that is not an easy thing to do. But, in terms of customer service, it has helped us because we are obviously much more proactive. We notice things before a customer reports them to us. For customer service there would have been some ROI, but it is hard to quantify.

One thing I like is that when you buy sensors, it's a perpetual license, so once you buy 2,000 sensors, you've got 2,000 sensors; it's not a recurring cost. With some products, it's a subscription model where you pay every year.

We looked at SolarWinds. If I remember correctly, it came down to cost. In that regard, PRTG did work out cheaper. In addition, one of our engineers had previously worked with PRTG so he had a bias toward PRTG already. It just made sense to go with it.

You can get the trial version of PRTG, you can get a load of sensors and the actual software package to try. Install it, give it a go, it is very easy to set up. SNMP is very easy to set up on Windows and Linux, and you've got a lot of options within PRTG so you really need to get stuck in and mess about with it to see if it has what you need in it.

In terms of the sensors and remote probes, I don't have many problems with it because everything seems to be covered by it. I've not found something that I've not been able to monitor or that I've not been able to find data for. I have no problems with the probes when it comes to actually sending them and receiving the data. They just go out, collect the data. I have no network problems with it.

We only monitor certain parts of the network with PRTG, but we do compare some of the historical data to real-time data, just to make sure everything's running smoothly and nothing looks out of place.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. It is a very solid product; it does what we need it to do. There are a few bits and pieces that I wish I could do with it which, due to what it is, they don't offer.

It provides a consolidated view of servers, switching, and network connectivity for the offices that I look after.

We are reactive sooner, when we need to be. There is less of waiting for our users to call, and say, "We have no Internet." It has allowed us to move a bit quicker.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. I have just taken over the IT infrastructure. I now have six months of history, so I know what my norms are. I can identify the quirks and issues from the history to keep going forward.

The most valuable feature is the notifications. As long as you spend time and think about what and when you want to be notified, it's always accurate. It is always there. I find things out before my Internet provider. 

Without all of the sensors or out-of-the-box functions, the notifications just don't work. For a small companies like us, it keeps an eye on our different offices and the few cloud servers that we have. We don't worry about them because the job is done.

The remote probe is fantastic, particularly since they started adopting. You can run them on smaller hardware. 

All of the sensors that I have needed in their adoption of some specific cloud have been great. 

The general server/client infrastructure is well done.

I don't like the desktop app and never use it. The web client is far easier to navigate with the notifications that pop up. The web app comes with everything that you need.

I preferred the look and feel of the previous version's user interface.

I would like to see more from an Office 365 standpoint, getting a more nitty-gritty app.

I am not sure the solution is giving me all the needed feedback that we need. When something goes off on our IT infrastructure, it does tell me. However, it would be nice if it gave more intuitive information, e.g., the hard drive has gone up by 60 percent in an hour. 

The stability is great in a 64-bit deployment. If anybody mixes it with a 32-bit speed version or with WMI sensors, I have found it to be wobbly. But, a 64-bit deployment is significantly stable.

The scalability is there, but smaller companies might need CAM software to be able afford the product. 

We have not used their technical support.

Our previous solution wasn't aware of what was going on across the environment. It was too focused on server infrastructure. This was a white label SolarWinds product through an MSP.

The initial setup is next, next, next, then done. You can't go wrong.

The installer works. It installs prerequisites. If you want to generate a remote probe for a site, at the other end of a VPN deployment, it creates everything encapsulated. You hit next four times, then it is installed. 

It took two hours from the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure. The hardest part was stopping auto discovery, because that goes out, finding everything. Sometimes, you're just not interested.

We deployed the product in-house.

The solution has enabled our IT department to be more cost effective by insourcing some of our functions that we used to throw over the garden fence (outsource).

It has saved us money because we are not paying a managed service provider to monitor 50 percent of our infrastructure. If there was a pricing/licensing model for smaller companies, this would provide me even more return.

Right now, the smallest sensor pack that they have is just a bit out of range for me, as a business. This kills me, as I need the product. Therefore, there is always a balance between needing to buy it or continuing their free version.

I would like better pricing models for smaller businesses. The free version is fantastic, but it's too restrictive. If they could just get up to 200 sensors for a reasonable fee for on-premise, I would give PRTG my credit card right now.

PRTG was the only vendor on the list. I knew what I wanted and knew I could get it.

Download the free installer, get it installed on a VM somewhere, and just watch. Pick a server, pick a network switch, and give it a go. 

Having used it from various iterations, the solution's feature set is great. There are moments where I want to go back in time and use the old IP tech product. However, as it evolves, with the quick releases that they bring, it really provides me an all-round product.

We primarily monitor Windows-based servers and services running within them. We also have some ties-in scripting into more bespoke areas, as well on our network.

We host a virtual environment running VMware in-house.

The historical data is used for looking at trends: Where we are versus where we were and whether or not additional loads may be our system. We are able to see this over a period of time, looking back historically.

The solution provides us with needed the feedback on our IT infrastructure. We use 12 monitoring servers, which we use to monitor our wide area network and router switches, so we do monitor bandwidth. From a network point of view, we can see the state of the network, as well as bandwidth usage and downtime.

The immediacy of the alerting is the most valuable feature. My role is to keep our network up and running. We have a dashboard in the office and are able to see things almost in real-time, within a minute or two. This is the greatest benefit.

The scripting element allows the bespoke option, so I am not just tied in to what is provided out-of-the-box. We have created a few bespoke scripts, e.g., we have tied it into our phone system to do various things, like monitor SIP trunks. 

The product is flexible, and we can move outside the predefined probes. Although to be fair, there are quite a lot of those to choose from anyway. The out-of-the-box probes generally suit us fine.

There are so many out-of-the-box features to look at that there are very few things that we have had to write bespoke scripts for. We don't have a particularly diverse environment to monitor, since it is all very box bound, Microsoft products, and relatively new.

Although they are fairly comprehensive with what you can do with them, the mapping and dashboards are a bit clunky to set up. I would like a more straightforward ability to create dashboards and maps. The network maps should be a bit more flexibility in the GUI to do what we need to do.

I don't have an issue with the stability of the monitoring probes and the basic server. 

We have had a few issues with the web elements, as far as the dashboard. With the dashboard, it has to be manually refreshed. Occasionally, we reboot the server, or at least web services, due to the web aspect. However, these don't affect the underlining monitoring.

We have started out with a 1000 probes. We're currently running, or have licenses for about 2500, running about 2000 individual probes on the system. It is showing a strain on the server. We are running on a Windows VM at the moment. We have somewhere in the region of 64GB and 4 Core running it. It is an okay server, but it is showing signs of a bit of a slow down, needing patches, updates, and reboots. It does take a while to come back to life.

We have added more probes to the solution. From the monitoring side, it is fine. However, using the server and rebooting, it is showing its age, especially if I have to restart services. Whether or not it is the application or the hardware that it is running on. 

It is doing the job for us and has scaled up from where it was originally.

If you are a small company with a few servers, the product is overkill. For a larger enterprise (like us), we have around a 120 Windows servers in our environment, and it seems absolutely fine. If you're a small company, you probably want more simple, straightforward products, as you don't need the features.

I haven't had that much reason to go to them. 

A colleague of mine primarily does the updates and patching version updates. We have had a couple of issues with incompatibility after the updates. Then, we have had cause to use the tech support. The issues aren't outstanding for too long.

Prior to implementing this, we had some very basic home written ways of determining things, like remaining space on disk. It was very fundamental and wasn't fit for the purpose. It was for when the business had half-dozen servers, and as we grew, it wasn't. We knew we needed something, so we looked around, settling on PRTG.

There wasn't an incident that lead us to implement the PRTG Network Monitor solution. Obviously, all systems will have issues now and then. We knew we had to put something in place, but there wasn't a specific incident or instance that drove us in this product's direction.

The solution provides us response times to issues, since we didn't have any of this type monitoring prior to putting PRTG in. The product has created a more robust environment. As an infrastructure manager, I am less at the mercy of staff members who are trying to find and work things out more quickly. There are just provided for me.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, as there were a lot of basic elements out-of-the-box.

As soon as any probes are in place, there is feedback straightaway from the system.

We purchased it through our reseller and implemented it ourselves.

It does help the IT department prevent or mitigate downtime. It allows us to pick things up which might not have been picked up that would have caused downtime. While there is a cost saving, it's rather intangible and difficult to state.

We are licensed for 2500 endpoints.

I don't have any comparison with direct competitors. We have been using PRTG for the better part of possibly ten years now. We haven't found the feature set lacking. Everything that we have tried to do, we have managed to work with PRTG to do it.

I would be happy to recommend PRTG. I have no qualms with it whatsoever. 

It does what we need it to do and is flexible. There are some areas, like setting up dashboards, which could be improved upon. However, I have no major problems with the solution and no concerns with renewing next time around.

I find the functionality within the web interface very feature-rich (compared to other products), so I have very few reasons to use the desktop app.