PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We use PRTG Network Monitor for connectivity and communication between devices.

The most valuable feature of this solution is being able to see things graphically.

I would like to see more updates available in this solution.

I have been working with PRTG Network Monitor for five months.

We are using the latest version. We just run the updates.

It's updated often. 

I have not had the need to contact technical support.

We are also using Zabbix.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It requires you to enter the IP addresses of what you want to monitor.

The price is pretty comparable.

To others who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend it, it's a decent product.

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

We use it for monitoring items on the network: switches, servers, and other devices, to guarantee or at least monitor uptime.

It has provided us with early warning for potential issues and has stopped potential downtime before it occurs. It also reduces the amount of wasted time that comes with dealing with things after the fact, so scheduled maintenance can be more easily performed.

It provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure by telling us whether things are up, what the current usage is, and whether we need to plan to modify that. It tells us whether there are spikes in usage that either need to be addressed within the application, based on additional resourcing for the application, or at the server level.

The most valuable feature is the alerting when there's downtime. 

Also, the feature whereby it shows when my hard drives are moving towards thresholds that would be considered outages, before they reach that point - that is valuable. That's the main thing we want out of it, a warning.

The Desktop app is fine, it's easy enough to use, it installs relatively easily. It's lightweight, it sits in the corner, and it pops up if there's a real issue. I tend to use the web interface to actually do any of the work within it. But the Desktop app sits there in the background and it works fine.

The sensors are good, there's a large availability, and they provide relevant information. The way those sensors are deployed allows you to modify and tweak them, based on what you want to achieve out of them. But you can equally remove sensors with relative ease if they automatically include things that you don't want to monitor.

I would like to see Office 365 monitoring. Essentially, it doesn't do it. I assumed not at all, but apparently it does it slightly. However, due to issues with APIs, they currently don't provide full monitoring for O365. It is something they're looking into.

I've not seen any outages with it so I'd say it's stable.

It's scaled as far as we've needed it to so far and we're planning to roll it out further. It scales perfectly fine. It's pretty easy to introduce new offices. We've got it on a core set of offices at the moment, but adding additional offices as they've been deployed has been a straightforward, easy process.

I've not had to use the tech support. I do use the online resources and, from that point of view, there seems to be a reasonably extensive knowledge library that answers any questions I've had to address.

We previously used SCOM as a solution and migrated to this because the feature set is quite similar, but it cuts out a lot of the noise and the complexity of the configuration. We started looking for other solutions which would give us something that was easier to configure whilst producing the same amount of information.

The initial setup was fine. It was straightforward enough.

I didn't personally install it so it's difficult for me to say how long it took from the time it was installed until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure, but I assume it was within minutes of it actually being installed. The installation of the sensors is quite quick, so it would have been five minutes or ten minutes after installation.

We had somebody internally who had used the product previously at another company. They were able to install it due to intrinsic knowledge of the product.

It's possible that it has saved us money, but it's difficult to measure because it's a sort of intangible in terms of downtime and the cost of downtime, depending on the system.

We did look at a couple of other solutions, but partly because we had somebody with in-house knowledge of PRTG and ability in it, they essentially gave it reasonably good reviews from their personal usage. So we chose to go with something that was a known factor.

We would have looked at stuff like SolarWinds and some others, but off the top of my head, I can't remember which ones.

It is a good solution, one that is at least worth investigating.

The historical data provided by the solution would potentially help optimize network performance, but it's not something I directly look at so I can't really pass along an opinion on that.

Overall, the feature set looks good. It covers off a lot of what we're interested in.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten. It does a lot of the things that I need it to do in terms of monitoring. It provides great feedback and produces it in an easily consumable way. The caveat is that it doesn't quite cover off everything I need it to do at the moment.

We use PRTG network monitoring to monitor our server, especially for computing resources. 

What I've found most valuable is the custom sensor, which allows you to write scripts or code to monitor a specific metric in your environment.

PRTG's application monitoring sensor is not strong and could be improved, and I've also had some issues with it crashing during upgrades. In the next release, I would like to see the ability to monitor connections between services.

I've been using this solution for more than a year.

The platform is stable - other than the issues with upgrading, we haven't encountered any problems with it.

I think the platform is relatively scalable - we added two additional probes, and everything has worked fine without any issues.

The technical support team is very responsive.

The initial setup was relatively easy.

Adding extra sensors will incur an additional cost.

I evaluated Centron, which is more flexible and customizable, but I think that PRTG is easier to administer. The initial setup with PRTG is also easier than with other solutions at the same level.

PRTG is very good for basic monitoring of computer resources and usage. However, if you have relatively complex environments, you may need a different product. I would give this solution a rating of six out of ten.

Our clients use this solution to see if the network is up and running, for pings and services such as emails and disk space.

I use it for monitoring since I am the system admin to keep things up. Overall, the information it gave didn't offer any suggestions to change anything.

The up-to-date graphs and the history are very good.

They keep adding services, such as MS SQL monitoring, and email monitoring to keep the different parts of the e-mails going.

The implementation is easy, initially.

Also, the servicing of Linux and Windows Operating Systems are useful.

The free version only gives us 100 free sensors to use. It would be nice if there was double that.

The additional services such as MS SQL and email monitoring took a bit of work, so I would like to see it easier to do.

I have been acquainted with PRTG Network Monitor for approximately seven years.

I have used it for a customer in the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version. I keep them updated.

It's a stable product and I have not experienced any issues. 

Our clients are not that large. It's single-server monitoring for some systems. We didn't have to scale it.

Our clients are small businesses, with under 100 seats.

We have not needed to contact technical support, but the forums are pretty good.

We did not use technical support because it was pretty straightforward. I kept my monitoring pretty simplistic, and I didn't try to do anything extra that would cause more angst and set things up.

We haven't used a monitoring system before.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to set up and implement.

To have the additional features costs a lot. It's too much. If it was half the price, we would purchase more.

All monitoring systems are close to the same pricing scheme.

For others who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend it. Please use it, it's good. It's very friendly, easy to use, and it's web-based, which means you don't have to be logged into a server to get something done.

Also, the updates are easy to do, just double click and away it went. On occasion, updates had to be done from the server, but that wasn't very often.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a nine out of ten.

Our use case for PRTG Network Monitor was end-to-end monitoring, but we couldn't achieve it, particularly the monitoring from the perspective of looking at the complete dashboard of the entire infrastructure, though it's a server virtualization network. For example, monitoring any device, even a swiping machine or a camera, or any device which comes and adopts an IP address should be monitored using PRTG Network Monitor, so that was our use case in the beginning.

Eventually, we then wanted the tool to also monitor our applications, so our current use case for PRTG Network Monitor is to monitor applications residing on our infrastructure, apart from devices that use or adopt IP addresses.

There was only one feature I liked about PRTG Network Monitor a lot, and that was bandwidth monitoring, though, in the newer versions of the tool, that feature is now a bit lacking.

Pricing for PRTG Network Monitor is also not as expensive.

It's a good tool, even for beginners.

A room for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is its sensors. Its application technology sensor, such as the IAS, .NET, etc., needs some improvement because it doesn't work as expected. For example, the IAS sensor doesn't give immediate information, and the information you get from it isn't of good value.

The web GUI of PRTG Network Monitor also needs improvement because errors keep popping up if it's not been updated to the latest version.

What I'd like to see in the next release of the tool is end-to-end topology mapping for the business model, and that should be required. There has to be a technical map. Technical mapping and topological creation are missing in PRTG Network Monitor, so I would like to see those in the future.

I've been using PRTG Network Monitor effectively for five years now, though I also used it in 2010, but only for very basic monitoring. Nowadays, I'm using the tool more extensively and doing a lot of monitoring on it.

In terms of the stability of PRTG Network Monitor, I would rate it a three out of five because this works on the web browser, but it requires too many updates. You have to update it frequently. For example, as soon as it's not running on the latest version, it starts giving you errors on the browsers, so it has a big room for improvement in terms of its web GUI.

PRTG Network Monitor is a scalable tool, and I'm rating it three out of five in terms of scalability.

We were in discussion with the PRTG Network Monitor technical support team quite intensively, but they weren't able to answer all our questions. We find them okay and up to the mark because they know what the tool can do and cannot do, so they were very, very precise, so at least their knowledge about their product was good.

We used a different solution before using PRTG Network Monitor, but that wasn't an apple-to-apple comparison. For example, we used an IP monitor from SolarWinds, but that was just a Ping or ICMP utility.

The initial setup for PRTG Network Monitor was not that complex, but you need to understand how it works, so it's not very difficult, yet it's not very easy. The setup for the tool is on the moderate side. On a scale of one to five, I'd give the setup a rating of three because if you'd like to effectively use PRTG Network Monitor, you need to set it up correctly.

It took almost a week to set the tool up correctly, but the actual installation was done in one day, with the bare minimum configuration and discoveries because it has a good discovery feature.

We deployed PRTG Network Monitor through our in-house team.

I've already seen ROI from PRTG Network Monitor.

PRTG Network Monitor is not that expensive, so I like it cost-wise. There's no additional cost apart from the standard licensing fees. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I would rate the cost of PRTG Network Monitor a two.

I'm using the latest version of PRTG Network Monitor because my company keeps updating the tool.

In my company, teams in Support and IT use PRTG Network Monitor and quite effectively look at the dashboard very often, so around one hundred people use it. Deployment was done in multiple places so seven to eight people in different regions took care of the deployment separately. At the moment, my company has no plans of increasing the usage of PRTG Network Monitor.

My advice to others looking into implementing PRTG Network Monitor is that if you're looking from a holistic infrastructure deployment and monitoring perspective, it's a good tool to use and to start with. PRTG Network Monitor is a good tool for beginners, so if you're a beginner, use it. If you're not a beginner, then you would need a tool with very exclusive end-to-end features.

I'm rating PRTG Network Monitor six out of ten.

My company is a customer of PRTG Network Monitor and has no partnership with the vendor.

RTG Network Monitor is used for monitoring many parts of our network, such as IP telephone system, internet traffic, firewall, and network utilization. Additionally, it can monitor server information, for example, CPU and memory usage.

I found PRTG Network Monitor very useful for troubleshooting and monitoring the utilization of either the network or server.

PRTG Network Monitor could improve by having a feature to allow uploading of preset standard network switch configurations and the ability to monitor the SLA configuration, such as uptime for the switches or internet connectivity. This would be very useful.

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

The solution is stable.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable, I can add more network components if I was to need them.

This solution is best fitted for small to medium-sized businesses.

I have not needed to contact technical support.

The initial installation was easy and it took approximately two weeks to cover all the network components.

I can do the implementation of the solution myself.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten.

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.

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

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

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

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

Over three years.

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

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

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

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

Technical support was responsive and helpful.

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

It was quick and easy to setup new devices.

In-house.

Figures unknown.

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

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

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