PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

• We run two data centers and are a hosted voice provider. 
• We have an Azure presence. 
• We use PRTG as a monitoring solution to effectively monitor all of our servers, routing infrastructure, and switches. 
• We have some Session Border Controllers, which are effectively Voice Firewalls. We monitor the uptime and availability of those via things like Ping. However, we are also using SNMP sensors. 
• We've written some SQL queries that PRTG is utilizing. 
• We check things, like error logs, through PRTG.
• We are feeding things, like system log messages. 
• We use SNMP Traps.

The scheduling has improved organization, effectively the ability to set maintenance windows where alerts won't go off on an evening. We have an on call router, as many businesses do. In our previous on call solution, we would be inundated with information that would come through outside of working, core business hours, which meant that the on call staff, like myself, were woken up when we didn't need to be. Whereas, with PRTG, it has been great. We can go in, and say "We only care about these core set of criteria outside of this time period." 

If there are upgrades, or things where we know alerts will be generated, we can go in and suppress those. While quite a simple feature, it is comprehensive, and it has a lot of capability to it.

The product is easy to use. The web interface is fantastic. It is very easy to create a user, giving it to someone with little explanation of how to use it. That is its biggest strength. 

It is very colorful. We have used it in quite an open office environment. We have screens on maps that we've made, which is great when customers come in. It gives them a clean visual.

There is a great variety or sensors. We use the custom SNMP sensors quite a lot, where you can import MIB files. The sensors has some cool little tools, as well, which you can use for modifying MIB files and importing them to PRTG. 

It is nice to have one place where all the information is right there in front of us.

The capacity planning is quite good, as you can monitor the CPU increase over time. While it is a manual process, we can go in and correlate it against an increase in user count, etc.

The feature set is very strong compared to other products that I have used. It's great, because it does everything that we need it to do. It's easy to use. It looks great when you present it in an open office environment. If you have it onscreen, it displays the information nicely. The ability to set thresholds against sensors are great. 

The desktop app is terrible. If I had to pick any flaw with the product, that is it. It seems like they haven't updated it. It has been six months since I last used it, and while they may have done something since, it was somewhat clunky. We use 4K resolutions on our laptops, and it didn't work properly. So, we had a few problems with the desktop app.

I would like to see improvements on the desktop app and mobile app. We use the mobile app a bit. However, since we try to keep our data centers really fenced and secure, we don't use it extensively, just in our offices. Some improvements to the desktop application would be great. 

The thing that we do struggle with a bit is in the historic data. If I want look over 30 days, because it averages out onto one graph, you can't zoom in and drill down information. E.g., if we had a problem with something a week ago, I can't really go back in and drill into what that might be, because it has already averaged it out over that time. While I get that this might be for technical reasons, it is still a bit of a limitation.

More than five years.

We run it in a cluster, so we have two that run together. The cluster behind it is sketchy at times. Maybe that might be due to a configuration on our side. 

From the stability point of view, it's 90 percent there.

Now that we have the distributor remote probes, it is pretty strong. The product used to be affected by load. This was because we were exceeding their recommendations. If you follow the recommended hardware guidelines and keep the sensor count to what they recommend, then it is pretty stable.

The remote probe thing is great. We have multiple data centers with multiple regions that we have to monitor. It's nice to know that all we have to do is throw up a remote probe into one of these areas, then have it talk back to the master cluster. We don't have to worry about anything outside of that. We don't have to worry about deploying brand new PRTG servers, as it's a lightweight installer. From there, we can even do an auto scan.

If we do build an entire new data center, we can just install a probe, get it to scan its local subnet, then feed that information back, which is really good.

The solution can 100 percent grow with our business.

The technical support seems to be quick, clever, and has a comprehensive knowledge base online, which is fantastic.

We have never really had a point where we were like, "We want to do this," but PRTG was the limiting factor. If we do ever hit that point, which we do on occasion, the technical support is brilliant. 

You can go to the technical support, and say, "We want to achieve this." For example, we wanted to compare two links in completely different data centers. We wanted a way where could present a graph on the screen that would compare the two and see how they were doing against each other. We didn't know how to do it. We couldn't figure out how to do it, so we approached PRTG. They said, "It's fine. You just want to do a custom sensor and follow these steps." 

If we do ever hit walls, we go to the technical support. To be fair, we rarely seem to hit any walls.

Before PRTG, we used something called MRTG, which was an open source alternative. Previously, it was very clustered, small monitoring systems which were just syslog-based with  big text files. It was alerts generated for just about everything. We had no central way of doing anything, and it got to the point where it was unmanageable. It became a case of needing one solution which could come in and just do everything.

The remote probes are great. We had some base core probes starting up, where they would collapse under the stress and the load. Setting up the remote probes has been great, especially the remote administration aspects of them. 

In the early days, we overloaded it a bit too much. We didn't distribute it out enough and had quite a lot of issues with it clustering, which I don't thing that we have entirely remedied now. However, its installers are quick and the web interface is exceptional. Once you get to that point, there are no problems at all.

We went direct to PRTG to buy it and implemented it ourselves.

It doesn't take long, maybe an hour, to do the setup and start receiving basic feedback on the functionality. Though, trying to get useful information, that can take a lot longer. Sometimes, there is a bit of information overload, which is not PRTG's fault. As users, you are quite eager to go scan everything and see what comes back. To really understand the information, sometimes it can takes months. However, that is not on the software.

It has saved time, because it makes it easier for us to find and identify problems. In the past, we might have gone to four or five different monitoring systems. Whereas, we now just go to one. It is one interface (webpage). We go there and find out everything that we want to know.

We paid quite a good chunk of money for it, but we don't have to pay for anything else (in terms of monitoring).

We bought a license for 4000 sensors.

We looked at the market, and it wasn't PRTG at first, which was just something we found from recommendations from other people along with a carrier that we worked with, a partner of ours, they actually used it. That was what sort of led us to it. They were using it for their end users, showing customers PRTG data files, stating, "We can give you all this information." We were like, "We want to do that as well!" So, we sort of stole it from them. 

We are extensively using its feature set, and there are a load of features in the product that which other solutions don't have.

It is abundantly helpful in bringing all our stuff in-house. Another platfrom that we use is SolarWinds Orion, which is a pure network monitoring tool. PRTG is much more reliable, easier to use, and the information is more clear and concise.

PRTG is great for everyone. It is really broad, and you can use it as intrinsically and technically as you want. At the same time, you can get some nice, clean, concise front-ends. We use it every day. We rely on it heavily and trust it. We have so many people that use it, and I receive very little complaints about it. The only problems we have: The desktop app is not great, and every now and then, we have issues with the clustering. 

PRTG has everything pretty much hammered down. They should keep releasing sensors. They also seem to be producing stuff at quite a good rate.

The product has been great, as it has really brought together all our monitoring.

We use it for some internet providers and educational institutes.

It is very flexible, and we can monitor many aspects of IT as well as ERP and CRM services. It has a very powerful interface and APIs for customization. 

Its price can be better. Its price is a problem for us because it is in dollars, and there is a high conversion rate. 

In terms of new features, it can have BGP monitoring. It should also have a dashboard and maps editor.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

It is installed on a Windows Server, and its stability is very nice.

Its scalability is good. For on-premises deployments, the scalability depends on the hardware. For cloud deployments, the scalability depends on the number of servers.

Around 50% of our clients are small organizations and around 20% of our clients are big organizations.

Their technical support is pretty good. As a reseller, we get fairly good support from them, and we also sell support services for our clients.

The initial setup is very easy. An average implementation takes one to two hours.

It is expensive.

They have a roadmap in which they have described all the features for the upcoming releases. This roadmap is available on their portal.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a ten out of ten.

On-premises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've not used technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We went straight to PRTG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using the latest update.

We use the solution for our firewall interface and bandwidth monitoring.

The solution may be modified to meet one's requirements. Mine are simply for SNMP bandwidth monitoring for my network interfaces. Others may have different needs when it comes to the solution. 

The capabilities the solution provides us meet our needs. We feel the solution and its features to be valuable.

We like the alerting system, the SNMP monitoring and the customization of the bandwidth. It dives deeply into the information concerning metrics. These are the reasons we chose to go with the solution. 

The automation should be improved. I am talking about automation by code and processes and provisioning the IP desk. Should the automation capabilities be addressed, I would raise my rating from an eight to a ten out of ten. 

We have been using PRTG Network Monitor for many years. 

The solution has good performance and I find it to be stable. 

The solution suits our scalability needs. We also onboard many other systems. 

We have our own technical team. As such, there has been no need for us to be in touch with technical support. 

Prior to the solution, we made use of Zabbix and continue to do so in respect of customers and management. We also tried out another product. 

The initial setup was simple, really straightforward.

Our team handled the entire setup, internally. 

Of course, the solution requires maintenance once deployed, as does every software in respect of upgrade, configuration and data backup requirements. This is part of one's product governance. 

Our price involves less than 5,000 tiers.

We are satisfied with the price. 

When software version releases come out, we simply install and upgrade them. 

The solution is cloud-based. We hosted our platform into our own cloud infrastructure.

For the moment, we are not looking for integration with other products. 

There are, perhaps, 25 users making use of the solution in our organization.

The solution boasts good performance. 

I would certainly recommend the solution to others. 

I rate PRTG Network Monitor as an eight out of ten. 

Private Cloud

The primary use of the solution is to secure network resources and to get a visual of what is connected.

I believe the solution has improved the way our organization works. 

The features of the solution that stands out are the ease of use and it is trouble-free.

The solution could be better and faster when it comes to performance. 

I have been using the solution for approximately eight years.

It is a very stable solution. There are no bugs, glitches and we have not experienced any crashing.

The solution has been adequate for us in terms of scalability.

There are two people using the solution in our organization and they are part of the network management team.

We have an unlimited license for this solution.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of ten. 

On-premises

We use it to manage our systems internally. At some point, we will be offering it as a managed service.

It has helped us make sure that most of our systems stay up. It has also helped us optimize our systems. For a lot of our systems, our software is a service, so they've worked absolutely fine on their own. Where we can't offer software as a service, like our website, it has helped us optimize these applications and keep the uptime on them, helping ensure they stay working.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us look back at prior instances, then we can use that information to come up with a solution or make improvements.

It is pretty simple to use, which is always a good thing. It's been very reliable in updating us if any issues crop up.

The sensors and remote probes seem to work absolutely fine. They don't seem to take up, if any, resources on the machines, which they keep an eye on quite nicely.

The solution's feature set is very good. It seems to be extremely reliable and all its features work. There is less for us to do, because it does what we need it to do.

While the desktop app is good, they could slightly improve it. We would like it to be a single pane of glass. At the moment, you can only see certain portions of information. You have to scroll through to make it more granular. We want them to develop the desktop app to be more user-friendly.

I would like a screen where you can get all the information without have to granually go look for it. If they can make it, so you can sort your own dashboard and customize it based on your needs that would be great.

I have never seen this solution go down once. Compared to everything else out there, which you see drop once in a while, this solution hasn't done that since we've taken it up.

It seems very easy to scale up. When you configure it, that is all you need to do. You only need to set it up once.

The solution will grow with our business. If we do need to add anything to the solution, it has not been a problem. Do it once, and that's it. It is done.

We have never really had to use them because the solution has been working that well. 

The company is only about a year old. This was the first solution that we used.

The initial setup is a tiny bit complex, but you expect these things to be a bit complex. However, it wasn't anything too taxing nor did it take a long time to set up.

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

We are the reseller, so we did the deployment.

It has saved us time. At previous companies that I have worked for, they have used similar solutions, which were not as good as this one. They still had to put a bit of work into working out why and what happened. This solution seems to give us an answer straightaway.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The reliability of the solution means we are doing less work trying to figure out issues and optimize systems, as it is already supplying us with the information that we need. Therefore, it has saved us a lot of time and effort.

Give the soluton serious consideration. If you are not too sure about it, try the free version. Then, if you like it, you can go to the paid version and roll it out.

My technical director chose this solution out of all the products that he had a look at, as it stood out straightaway.

The modes for the desktop app, like the API, update via email, providing us the information that we need with handy options, which we use mostly when monitoring. There are easily integratable into our call logging system, which automatically logs a call when there is an issue.

• 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.

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

First let me start by saying I have been using system monitoring tools for a very long time. I first cut my teeth with HP Openview "back in the day" and most recently with Microsoft System Center which I have now completely replaced as a monitoring and alerting system with a bit of software called PRTG from a company called Paessler.Here are the top 10 strong points of PRTG: - Rapid deployment - But, there are best practices for sure... - Highly scale-able - Intuitive interface - quick learning curve - Inexpensive to license - Accurate - Works with most infrastructure without customization - Updated often and very easy to update - Good support from the vendor - Kind to diskspace consumption - not sure how they do it! - Easy to re-architect as your infrastructure changesMy company runs a large scale SAAS infrastructure with a large mix of technologies. PRTG is the first software product we have used to accurately alert the right people of trouble. This has been a huge boost in customer satisfaction for sure.

There is not much not to love in this software but one item on my wishlist that has yet to be addressed in an intuitive way is the ability to use and manage templates. This would allow you to apply templates easily and then modify templates easily.