PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

I use PRTG Network Monitor to monitor server and network environments in my company.

Most of the products either provide features for network monitoring or efficient server monitoring. There are different products for server monitoring when it comes to ManageEngine or SolarWinds, and there are different products for server monitoring. There are different metrics to consider when monitoring servers and networks. RTG Network Monitor gives me a complete picture of both the modules, which are server monitoring and network monitoring.

Technical support is an area with concerns in PRTG Network Monitor, where improvements are required. The product is very good, but its local presence in the Saudi Arabian market is unavailable.

I would like PRTG Network Monitor to introduce some security features for monitoring the security devices. The server and network monitoring functionalities in PRTG Network Monitor are very efficient. The security features of the product should provide the same level of efficiency as it provides for server and network monitoring so that its users or customers get all its features in a bundle.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for six years. I am just a consumer of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Around ten people in my company use PRTG Network Monitor.

The product's initial setup is simple.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I took care of the implementation part of PRTG Network Monitor by myself.

I rate the price of PRTG Network Monitor an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price.

I compared PRTG Network Monitor with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. I chose PRTG Network Monitor over other products in the market since it provides complete monitoring of my servers and network devices. SolarWinds and ManageEngine have different products for server monitoring and different products for network monitoring.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for monitoring the bandwidth and reachability of a big network. We rely on reachability to generate an alarm as banks have different branches and routers. We use the PRTG to assess whether there is any fault in any branches or ATM buses. We have been using a site with 5000 sensors in 60-78 sites.

The solution is good, very friendly, and simple to use. I have been taking training. As far as it's not complicated, you can use it.

The automation part can be more flexible. It will be much easier for an administrator to work on. It can discover all the devices in a network and design its network.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor as a customer for eight years.

We have observed many things when we were analyzing the bandwidth.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I've used FortiMonitor, Huawei, and SolarWinds before. SolarWinds is complicated. An administrator needs more skills to work with SolarWinds. If you're going for a data center or vendor monitoring, it's good to have PRTG set up because it's very reliable.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is expensive compared to FortiMonitor. PRTG is costly for small scale, but for large scale, FortiMonitor is more expensive.

The solution is very user-friendly. You get whatever you need, but it has room for improvement too.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It's a globally distributed network. We have multiple data centers or IT setups, and PRTG is deployed at the local data centers. Some of the applications are in the cloud, and PRTG can also monitor those.

PRTG is simple to manage. First, you can create a template for a device, then apply it to hundreds of similar devices. That's a great advantage. Secondly, I can use the 80-20 functional rule for any devices I need to monitor. 

For infrastructure monitoring, 80 percent of parameters are monitored every minute or so. I can define all of them at the highest level, and those definitions are inherited at the lowest level. Then you need to customize the setup for the remaining 20 percent. You can deploy them in various groups and do a group-level setup, which will again percolate down to devices. 

The third thing is the concept of tags. PRTG assigns tags to devices and also the parameters you monitor. For example, if you choose to deploy a bandwidth sensor, PRTG automatically tags it with that parameter while giving you the freedom to apply your own tag. 

Let's say my organization has three or even four ISPs. If I'm globally distributed, the ISPs could be different. Now I can monitor all the bandwidth across ISPs based on the tag, or I can see the bandwidth of each ISP individually. I know my uptime and recovery in case of failure. I can also group by choosing a specific ISP tag and getting a report. I now know which of my ISPs is a better performer, which helps me improve the service and decide who to go with.

PRTG is constantly evolving. You have between eight to 12 releases every year, including enhancements to functionality and performance as well as security and bug fixes, so it stays current with our business requirements. It's a well-rounded product.

There's always room for improvement. The high availability feature is good, but it's an area that PRTG could marginally improve. For example, in PRTG, both servers have a different IP, but it would make things a lot easier if they were bound by a single IP.  I'm not necessarily trying to say PRTG should imitate other products. 

I'm saying it should be like a typical HA solution should be. It is a fail-safe feature, and the HA component should act like one. In PRTG, it is in an active-active mode, not active-passive. Now, the customers don't need to know the mechanism behind the high availability. They just need to know how many servers are required for deployment. If there is a cluster with a single IP address, it's much easier from the customer's point of view. 

We've been working on various versions of PRTG since 2003. While we are using PRTG, we are also looking at various alternatives, but we haven't seen a reason to switch so far.

PRTG itself is a highly reliable product because of large installed base.

Overall, PRTG is easy to install and understand. We provide frontline support for our customers, but our more competent customers don't come back to us for any support at all. If they don't have the skills, they can install and do the basic deployment, but they require hand-holding and coaching for some things. Still, I think it's a straightforward product. Once a user gets started with the product, they don't need hand-holding for basic functions.

The price of PRTG is reasonable. PRTG's competitors like SolarWinds and ManageEngine charge more for the same functionality. They are much more expensive at licensing level. What's more, PRTG comes as one bundle. For example, the database is part of the PRTG release, so Paessler takes total responsibility for all components they deliver. With other products, you need a separate database engine and databases, and these NMS companies don't take responsibility. When they put out new releases, what if it doesn't work with the previous release of a database? Things become a little tricky. You have to deal with two or more entities for NMS but only one with PRTG.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor 9.5 out of 10. If you're planning to implement PRTG, my advice is to first create a master plan. Set a goal for monitoring. Decide what you want to monitor and why. You need to get ready by organizing network management at the technical and policy level. If you start with a clear understanding of your goals and your environment, PRTG will be a cakewalk.

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.

We use the solution for full network monitoring, to manage our entire estate; that includes things like disk space and network usage. It alerts us of any potential outages so that we can attend to those before they occur.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance in that we do quite a lot of analysis on our network traffic. We want our user experience to be the best that it can possibly be. We'll look for trends in things like login times, disk space usage, how much we're burning through. That feature absolutely helps us.

Also, before we used this solution we had issues with the servers running out of disk space. This has completely stopped all that now. We've put in decent thresholds whereby we're not running out of disk space before we know there's an issue. We give ourselves plenty of leeway so that doesn't happen anymore.

When it comes to feedback on our IT infrastructure, again it's the disk space, but also the utilization of our network. If, for instance, a switch is getting overloaded, we can take proactive action to prevent any problems. That's the main kind of driver for us. This doesn't let us get into trouble. We are aware of problems before they occur.

The most valuable feature for us is the disk space and CPU usage because we are quite intensive in those fields. PRTG gives us the visibility into those straight away. We've got it set up in a pie-chart with all of our servers down the left-hand side. If everything's green, everything's working. If it's amber, there's a potential issue. If it's red, then we're in trouble, and it's as simple as that. It's a traffic-light system. It works perfectly.

Ease of access is important as well - it's all in the product, it's all in the sensors - and it has been great for us. The sensors and probes are great, nice and lightweight, they don't take up too many resources on the system. We just deploy them out and they start reporting instantly.

The desktop app is great. We've got it set to auto update, and it just ticks away nicely. We also use the mobile app as well. Various members of our infrastructure team have got that app on their mobile devices, so when they're out of the office they can check up on the estate, as well. We can do 24/7 monitoring.

The only thing we have been looking at, which is not so much about the solution itself, is some training. I know there are a lot of online training resources, but some classroom-based training is one of the things that we have been looking for. 

Also, when it comes to third-party integration, one of the things we were looking at was putting some sensors onto our firewall, for instance. If there were a little bit more documentation and some step-by-step guides around that, that would be useful for us. That would be about the only thing I would say regarding the product itself.

It's very stable. We've never had any kind of outages in terms of the dashboard not being available. Any updates that we've applied haven't caused us any issues. It's a great, reliable product.

We've not found any kind of real performance degradation. There may have been times where some of the sensors may have paused slightly but I think they were just anomalies. It has not been a regular occurrence. Perhaps there have been occasional stability issues, but they have been very few and far between.

It's very scalable. At the moment we have around 1,000 or 1,200 sensors. We know that it would be very easy if we wanted to expand that. We could simply add in more sensors very easily.

I don't think we've ever actually had to engage with technical support because we've never had any issues with it. That speaks for itself.

The main driver behind our decision was that we partnered up with a third-party which did all our monitoring for us but we moved away from that. There was a requirement to do it ourselves and that's why we chose PRTG.

Our setup was very straightforward because we planned out what our estate looks like through network diagrams, decided on what metrics we wanted to capture, and then deployed it across. The product itself made it very easy for us to do that.

From setup to the start of data analysis took three to five days.

We used our preferred reseller, which is CCS Media. But we had already done research into the product ourselves. It was just a case of buying the license through our reseller.

On a yearly basis, I believe it's between £1,200 and £1,500. It's relatively inexpensive, for what we need.

We didn't really consider anything else because we'd previously used PRTG, before we used our third-party partner. It was very easy for us to come back to it.

You should absolutely look at this solution. It gives us everything that we need: The lightweight aspect of it on the network, the amount of information. It's absolutely worth the money.

In terms of the feature set, the overall impression is very good. We've been using the product for just over 12 months now. We've just recently renewed that license because the product is very good and gives us all the information that we need.

We bought around 1,200 or 1,500 sensors. Our estate supports around 450 users. I think we've almost maxed out on how many sensors we've deployed because we've got quite a large estate. We've got around 150 servers, and then we also have 100 or so switches. With all those, it's very easy to burn through our sensor limit.

I rate PRTG at ten out ten, easily, because of the ease of use, the information provided, and the fact that we've never had to raise any kind of technical support ticket. That in itself should sell the product.

My clients primarily use PRTG for monitoring network devices, bandwidth, server status, and security devices like Sophos firewalls, and CCTV systems. It helps ensure efficiency, security, and reliability across their IT infrastructure.

The real-time monitoring feature in PRTG is invaluable to me. It provides immediate insights into network performance, which is crucial for proactive maintenance. Another standout feature is its recommendation system, especially in the enterprise version, which helps optimize operations by automatically managing failovers. Additionally, the flexibility to customize data storage and the option to remove old data after a certain period is also essential for efficient resource management.

Improvements in data storage flexibility, such as allowing customers to specify data retention periods, would enhance PRTG. Additionally, implementing OID panels for wider device support, especially for devices like UPS network equipment lacking standard OID support, would be beneficial.

I have been working with PRTG Network Monitor since 2008.

I would rate the stability of PRTG at a nine out of ten.

PRTG is quite scalable. It is not just about software; scalability extends to hardware with customizable solutions. PRTG is suitable for companies of all sizes, from small to enterprise-level, with support for up to 1,000 devices.

While the tech support offers good remote login assistance, there is room for improvement in response time for critical problems. Overall, I would rate their support nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was simple.

Pricing for PRTG depends on the number of licenses needed, ranging from as few as two hundred to potentially as many as forty thousand. The pricing model is flexible, making it suitable for a wide range of businesses and budgets.

PRTG and SolarWinds both offer comprehensive solutions, but PRTG's simpler pricing model based on device count makes it more appealing. With PRTG, everything is included in one package, whereas SolarWinds often requires additional monthly payments for various features. This straightforward pricing structure makes PRTG a preferred choice for many.

PRTG helps clients identify and resolve network issues by providing comprehensive monitoring without requiring configuration changes. It collects data from various devices and systems, including Cisco and Juniper, and offers flexibility in monitoring settings to suit different needs, such as traffic analysis or vendor-specific monitoring.

I would recommend PRTG, especially for users with limited budgets who want an effective monitoring solution. Overall, I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

I have a consulting role and my customer is trying to choose between PRTG Network Monitor and other solutions. I already have PRTG as an option, so they can have a third option.

PRTG Network Monitor is easy to set up. Within a few minutes, it is operational. It is an all-in-one monitoring solution without extra costs. For example, we set it up for an insurance company with branches across Africa. We are able to monitor from Lagos without installing anything in the branches, using the agentless feature. We just put in the IP address and the parameter, and we monitor from those ends. 

Additionally, all the sensors are very useful. Most people are interested in the bandwidth monitoring sensor to see what bandwidth the users are consuming. The pricing is affordable compared to SolarWinds.

PRTG Network Monitor needs to enhance network performance monitoring. Moving towards observability, similar to what Datadog offers, could be beneficial. Specifically, they need to improve application performance monitoring, error tracing mechanisms, and log management. Log management is not detailed enough unless exported to Syslog or other tools.

I have been familiar with this product for five to eight years.

PRTG Network Monitor scales easily. If scaling up is needed, you just move to the next band, adding about 50% of additional cost. 

On a scale of one to ten, scalability is rated as 9.5.

The technical support is good. The setup process is well-documented, making it easy to deploy. However, unlike SolarWinds, which requires specialized training due to its complexity, PRTG's process is more straightforward.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to configure. All the necessary instructions for setup are provided.

PRTG comes in different bands: there are options with 500, 1500, 2500, and so on. Pricing is by the number of devices, not by sensor.

I would recommend PRTG Network Monitor, especially if the customer is cost-conscious. However, if the network to be monitored is extensive, either PRTG or SolarWinds could be recommended. 

Overall, I rate PRTG as nine or 9.5 out of ten.

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.