PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We have deployed this solution on numerous platforms.

The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors. For example, we have an HP Server, but we do not need an HP Server monitor, or a separate storage monitoring system that is specific to HP. We are able to use this solution for a centralized, multiple-technology safe.

The dashboarding definitely needs improvement.

It would be nice if they included support for analytics, such as functionality to help understand trends in the data. The data might include network outages, network utilization, and storage utilization. Also, if there is any kind of predictive ability coming out then it would add a lot of value.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

Our environment contains two and a half thousand servers and ten thousand desktops.

We have six people who perform the support functions. It is used on a daily basis, and we are planning on expanding usage to include access to our help desk. There are automated tickets generated when PRTG picks up faults on the network.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We used WhatsUp Gold prior to this solution. There were multiple problems with varying versions and support channels, and there is no standardization or central visibility with all of the instances.

What we wanted was a tool that is scalable and could be used in a modular approach, so we chose PRTG and moved away from WhatsUp Gold.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward.

The deployment took approximately three months. There are a vast number of files and a level of complexity in our environment, but that is not the fault of the vendor. Unfortunately, given that we do not have a small environment, the deployment took time.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and we were very happy with their service.

We have not been measuring ROI from a financial perspective. Rather, we are looking at measuring efficiency. This is determined by looking at how quickly we discover faults and how quickly they are remedied. We have just started with this.

We have an unlimited perpetual license, so we just pay support costs and it can scale throughout the organization. 

For anybody who is interested in implementing this solution, I would say that planning is essential. It can be very complex and can generate a lot of data. You can become overwhelmed and then the solution becomes irrelevant because of the number of reports and alerts that it can generate. Planning is critical.

This solution is geared towards practical alerting and monitoring. It is not really meant to give advice or any sort of analytics.

Overall, this is a very good platform and provides value to the organization. However, in terms of the dashboards, there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

• 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.

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 to monitor services, things like hardware usage and whether hard drive space is running out. We use it for quite a lot of our networking solution as well. If there's a glitch in the network, anything that's abnormal, being able to see that show up is quite good.

The historical data provided by the solution helps optimize our network performance. We can see what's going on in our network infrastructure, more so in terms of our core networking. We can see which fiber links have been used heavily and, if they are used heavily, we can introduce more links to particular buildings or particular areas. It's more around the networking that we use the historical data. 

Also, if we have any issues with particular hardware, we can monitor those. We can monitor the network on those ports and come back with any issues or see if anything is flipping out or has stopped working. It's helpful being able to see that historical data.

It makes us more proactive, as opposed to reactive, with any issues. We tend to see issues occur before anyone else even knows about them. That's really useful for us. Particularly if there's any abnormality on the network, because of the historical data, we tend to know about it. PRTG tells us about anything that's out of the ordinary, which is good.

The sensors work well.

The remote probes seem to be a little bit buggy at times. They just stop working or they say they can't communicate. What we tend to do to is install the remote app onto the servers that we use. That seems to clear it up. As long as the app is there, all the probes seem to work fine.

It would be nice if, for the maps view - what you can lay out on the screens - there were a bit more functionality. It would help to be able to add titles to the top or to be able to change text sizes. There's not much you can really do with that in terms of configuration at the moment.

The stability has been good since it went in. It's never had any issues. It has just worked. It updates itself, it's easy to manage, easy to maintain.

It's difficult for me to judge the scalability. For what we use it for - I think we've got 1,000 sensors and we use about 800 or 900 at the moment - it all runs fine. I'm sure it would scale very well if we needed it to go any further than that. But for what we use it for, it's relatively small.

We haven't used the tech support or the online resources. It has always just worked; it's always been fine.

We have a third-party we go to if we get stuck with our network and they recommended PRTG. They actually started using it to troubleshoot some issues on our site, and from that, we decided it was something we wanted, so we invested in it from that point and set it up from scratch.

There wasn't really any system downtime which factored into our decision, but there were a few performance issues which PRTG helped us to solve. That was another reason to get it put in place, long-term.

The initial setup was surprisingly easy, the way the menus are all laid out. I set it up myself and it explained what to do, where to go. There were little pop-ups on the screen saying, "This is where to go for this, that's where to go for that." It made it all really easy to do. 

Also, adding servers or switches, it was auto-discovery, so I didn't have to do any config on that. You could just let it discover everything and then delete what you don't want.

It took about two days from the time I set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure.

PRTG was recommended to us and we went with it on the free basis to start with and then we moved to the paid version, for more sensors. We haven't really compared it to anything else, because it was recommended. Overall it seems very good.

Just install it, follow the instructions, and off you go. It just seems to work.

We do use the Desktop app and it's good, it works very well. It's very similar to the web-based system. It gets a little bit annoying sometimes because there are quite a lot of pop-ups. I'm sure we could turn them off but that's not something we've looked into. I actually find myself exiting the Desktop app, just to stop the pop-ups.

I wouldn't say that it has made our IT department more cost-effective at this point because, although we pay for it and we use it, we haven't really made any changes on the network because of PRTG. I don't think we've had any cost savings anywhere.

I would rate it eight out of ten. The desktop app seems a little clunky sometimes. There are a lot of pop-ups saying things are offline when they're not necessarily. That's more due to those probes. When we install the app on the servers there're no issues there, so we can get around that.

We use it to monitor our servers. We try to monitor all of the functions the servers as closely as possible.

The historical data provided by the solution allows us to look back in time and look at the baseline performance of the sensors. We can compare them over time to see if anything has gotten worse or improved. The data helps us optimize network performance.

It allows us to be more proactive when monitoring our infrastructure. With PRTG, we normally know of issues with our servers before anybody reports them. We used to be very reactive, but now we are alerted instantly. We've got hundreds of servers, so it's impossible to monitor them manually.

It definitely enables our IT department to be more cost-effective because we don't waste time checking things manually, which can be quite time-consuming. It frees us up to concentrate on the issues that we've been alerted to through PRTG.

The solution also provides us with defined measures of performance so we can see whether it has improved or decreased over time. We can then improve our infrastructure. We can measure that using PRTG.

Some of the valuable features include the following.

• Ease of use. The authentication links into our standard Active Directory authentication, which is very good.
• It's got a wide variety of sensors that can be applied to many different aspects of the service to monitor them. There's a very good selection.
• The remote probes are very useful. They allow us to provide a reference across different areas in the network. In trying to localize issues, that's very useful.
• It's web-based, which is a big advantage when you can access it from anywhere. 
• It's very reliable.
• It's independent of other equipment, so it's not going to fail due to anything else failing in the infrastructure.
• It's got apps as well, so it's accessible, even on your mobile.

It's an excellent product. In terms of the overall feature set, it has a lot of features. It can monitor a wide range of aspects of our equipment and it has a lot of options for alerting.

It's very good for monitoring our internal infrastructure, but we're using more cloud services now. It would be useful to be able to get information back from these cloud services in detail, and display any issues within PRTG for the rest of our systems.

It's very stable. It has to be when it's monitoring for failures in other parts of the system. We've had very few issues with stability. It's been very good.

It allows us to easily increase the number of sensors and the scope of what we can monitor. The scalability is very good. It grows with our business. We initially bought a set number of licenses and then upgraded it and bought additional server licenses to monitor other things in the business.

We haven't had to resort to contacting tech support much over the years that we've been using it. When we have, they've always responded quickly and been very good at helping to resolve any issues.

We didn't have a previous solution in place. 

It was very easy to set up a trial version of the server and evaluate it for a period to see what we could get out of the product.

The time from setup of the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure was quite quick. Before the trial was over, we already had a lot more information than we had had before. It was worth definitely the cost of licensing it and paying for it.

We did it ourselves. It was so easy.

I'm not involved in the commercial aspect of the solution, but the pricing is very low compared to other solutions.

We evaluated a number of different server monitoring solutions and selected PRTG as the best solution to go forward with. We looked at WhatsUp Gold and Nagios. PRTG was much easier to use, configure, set up, and get running. It provided better information which was very well displayed.

We also had downtime previously. That was definitely why we went ahead with a monitoring solution, so we could be alerted quickly to any issues and resolve them before they affected our service and users.

I would recommend trying PRTG and seeing the benefits.

We don't tend to use the Desktop app because the web-based interface is so good. I really don't have a lot of experience with the Desktop app.

I would say the product is a nine out of ten. It's been very successful and done exactly what we wanted it to do.

Our primary use case is network performance monitoring, but we also use it for things like network traffic flows and getting a better idea of the actual types of traffic that are going through our network.

We've used the historical data quite a bit. It has fed into our DR process, which was not a main use case but has been quite handy.

We've got monitoring on a number of our key apps. The alerting comes from PRTG and goes into the Slack channels of the development team. That is all segregated away from the operations team, so the alerting goes to the people in the format that they like most of all. That has really helped the turnaround and issue identification.

The solution has also enabled us to consolidate and be more cost-effective as an IT department. About two or three years ago we had two or three legacy apps in place and we've been able to consolidate that into one. It has definitely been a cost-saver.

Finally, while we hadn't necessarily experienced downtime, we were having issues with stability in the network. Some of the output from PRTG helped to narrow down where those issues were coming from, so it gave us a much clearer idea of where we need to go.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard interface. It's very clean, it's very simple to use.

The alerting is also excellent, it's just what you need. It's not too fussy, it's not too difficult to set up, and from an operational perspective, the feedback that I get from the guys is always excellent.

The overall feature set is good. We're probably not doing it justice. It has an awful lot of integrations which we're just not using at the moment. It's very vendor neutral, very vendor agnostic. I wish we could be using it more, to be honest with you. At the moment we've got an on-premise solution. We're looking to move to the cloud, but we haven't actually explored that with the vendor yet.

We've got a few sensors deployed in the network but not too many. We've had some issues previously with the performance of the sensors. We tend to deploy quite a bit of WMI, which is quite processor-intensive, and we've found that that impacts the sensors quite a bit. We've had to tune that down a little bit over time. That is something that we've spoken to the vendor about and we've been able to work through those issues.

Our experience with the remote probes has been similar. At scale, we've found that they can struggle sometimes, but that depends on the type of query that you're throwing at it. That's probably more a limitation of the query itself than the software.

In terms of additional features, we are potentially exploring things like containerization and I'm not really what sure the ability of the software is around that.

The reports I've had from the team on its stability are all good. It seems to get patched on a very regular basis. There are constant updates. We haven't any problems, we haven't had any downtime yet, and we've been running it for 18 to 24 months now. It's excellent.

We've had some issues with the sensors and remote probes. We're a relatively small environment, but we've started to see limitations based on the actual type of queries that we're throwing at it. We've been able to work around that and the support from vendor has been excellent in that respect.

The technical support has been excellent. We've predominantly raised support tickets but we've also gone through our account manager, and a couple of issues that we've had have been escalated.

We had two or three solutions and we wanted to consolidate. One of them was SolarWinds ipMonitor, but I can't remember what the development one was now. They were going end-of-life and we wanted to consolidate, we wanted a single platform that we could work with. In terms of the feature set, PRTG seemed to cover all the bases.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We took quite a phased approach so we were probably rolling it out over the space of six months. We took our time with it. The experience that we had was good.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our IT infrastructure was within the space of a month or two. That was mainly due to the pace at which we rolled it out. We started to get some good feedback quite early on, during the first week or so, but overall the time it took was due to the speed of our implementation.

We went directly through the vendor, and we deployed in-house.

It has definitely provided us value. It's just that we haven't necessarily measured that value.

We've got the unlimited package. I don't know the licensing situation today, but I believe it was around the £15,000 per year mark. It's probably about a couple of grand per month, at most.

We had a look at SolarWinds, their network monitoring suite, which was the big player in the market. It's got a price tag to match and that was certainly a factor. Admittedly, it is a much bigger product, it's got broad capabilities and it's got different kinds of integrations. For what we needed at that time, PRTG absolutely suited.

Scrub out your requirements. PRTG does the network side very well indeed. If asset monitoring and integrations with other products are really important for you then it might be worth looking at this as well as a secondary product. Also, you need to plan your deployment and understand where and how to deploy the remote sensors.

I prefer the web client. I've had limited use of the Desktop app and, from what I've seen, it's good, but I find using the web app is a lot cleaner in my workspace.

The product has to be about a nine out of ten. From my somewhat more high-level view, the summary dashboards are excellent, they give me what I need. Having spoken to the operations guys, it gives them everything they need. It's quite a simple interface, it's very expandable, and has allowed us to get control of it in a single console. That is really what we need for a small team.

We use it for network monitoring, mostly. We look at any metrics that the sensors pull back for us, such as availability, performance. We have some custom sensors for service monitoring.

The solution's historical data helps us optimize network performance. We can find issues by looking at historical data and benchmark it against what it should be.

It's given us metrics which we can then pass on to customers, availability statistics and things like that. It's really added value to the services we provide. From that point of view, it has definitely improved things.

It makes our IT department more cost-effective because we can detect failures faster, we can do something about them. We can get early warnings on things that are going to go wrong, be proactive about dealing with them, and have less downtime.

It gives us the needed feedback on our IT infrastructure, such as utilization of disks on a server. We get that information back and are able to act on it.

One of the valuable features is the diversity of metrics available to us to monitor. It's all there, it's all in the box. It's all made very easy, by virtue of it being pre-configured. You point it at the box, pull your credentials in if you need to, and off it goes and does it. A lot of solutions do that, but this just has it all in one box, which is what makes it really good.

The solution’s sensors and remote probes are great, spot on. They keep improving them. It's only a problem from time to time when old sensors get deprecated and you have to replace them with a new one, but other than that it's a very good selection.

The overall feature set is good. It's diverse, it's all there.

I don't think the Desktop app is that great. I don't like it. I would like to see cross-compatibility on different platforms. Also, the window management isn't that great, and the refresh rates aren't that great.

Their roadmap is good and the features that they're releasing are good, but our main ask is around the scalability issue that I've mentioned elsewhere in this review.

If you have enough resources the stability is fine, fairly rock-solid. We're at double the recommended capacity in terms of sensors for our instance, and it's running fine.

Scalability is the only major sticking point for me. There is a recommended number of sensors, which is around 10,000, and we're double that. We're not comfortable putting any more than that, even though the server might be able to handle it. It's already well outside the support boundaries for the solution. 

The only option we have to scale is to buy another core, which would be a separate, stand-alone instance, would not be managed through the same interface, and we would have to be looking in two different places. We love the product, but at the moment that is the main sticking point for us.

There have been no real problems with tech support. We don't really need to go to them, the product takes care of itself. When we have needed them, they have been very responsive and gotten back to us quickly.

We did have system downtown before implementing the solution, but it didn't really influence our decision to get PRTG. We needed a monitoring system anyway, by virtue of the nature of our business.

We would have been using an open-source solution before PRTG but we needed a more feature-rich product to work with, given the number of solutions we were operating.

The initial setup was very easy. There's nothing much to do, honestly. You just install the software on the core server and then you can install remote probes in any private sub-nets that you need and they will speak back to the core. It's very straightforward.

Within about a half an hour of installing it, we had information back.

We did it ourselves.

Subjectively, it probably has saved our organization money, but it would be difficult to quantify it.

We pay for a perpetual license and we have a support fee.

We've had PRTG in place for a number of years, so what we evaluated was in the early days, a lot of open-source solutions: Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti, etc. PRTG is differentiated because it caters to all platforms and endpoints, has features for Windows, and WMI sensors which aren't necessarily available out-of-the-box in the other solutions. That would have been a determining factor.

It will do the job, more than anything I can think of. It will give you really useful monitoring statistics out-of-the-box, and will give you the ability to customize and do things that aren't there by default. It will take care of all your monitoring needs, pretty much, but just be conscious of scale.

I would say PRTG is an eight out of ten. We're very happy with the functionality. Those missing two points come from the scalability issues.

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.