PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is monitoring all our live servers, their resources and networking equipment like firewalls, routers, switches and network switches. Additionally, we have a bandwidth monitoring map deployed in PRTG Network Monitor to monitor our internet bandwidth continuously. The solution is deployed on-premises.

We have found the ESXi feature very valuable. It allows us to directly add individual VMs independently. We can also add the ESXi so each VM is considered a sensor, and each sensor can get all the resource parameters like CPU usage, memory usage and network usage. Everything is combined in one sensor, and we can utilize it. Unlike other competitors, this feature is only available in PRTG Network Monitor. Otherwise, we have to go with multiple sensors and it will be costly.

The product could be improved by being cross-platform friendly. A feature we would like to see in the next release is support for bare-metal servers. For virtual machines, we have many options in PRTG Network Monitor, but adding sensors to the bare metal servers is difficult because it does not support all ranges of servers. It has to have a much better database of custom servers and resources. Some of the new servers are not added in PRTG Network Monitor. They don't have the database now and we would be glad if they added more databases of server templates.

We have been using this solution for four years and are currently using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Currently, we have about 15 people using it in our organization. These 15 people are in charge of deployment and maintenance. We intend to expand the usage to 2,500 licenses.

Our experience with customer service and support has been superb.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Deployment was done in-house and took approximately two hours.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by supporting bare metal servers and cross-platform friendly. I recommend this solution to all types of users because it doesn't require prior knowledge of other configuration sets. PRTG Network Monitor is user-friendly and takes just one click to install the solution in Windows. Amateurs with no previous knowledge of networking can use it because it is very user-friendly. SNMP configuration is straightforward, and unlike its competitors, it seems to be a user-friendly tool.

Additionally, it has a free version which can be used for 100 sensors. If it is a small-scale business they can use the free version with 100 sensors and utilize that as well. If it is for a big enterprise, they can have 2,500 to 10,000 sensors. They also have custom modes for payments. It is a superb product.

Our use case is limited.

It does what we need it to do in terms of learning.

I like the mobility of the PRTG Network Monitor and ITOps Dashboard.

Our biggest issue, and the reason we are trying to move away from PRTG, is that it is not scalable across an enterprise solution.

The scalability of this solution could improve as well as the automated provisioning of the infrastructure.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor off and on for approximately ten years.

I don't recall the version that we are working with but we recently upgraded it.

PRTG Network Monitor is a stable solution. I would rate the stability of PRTG Network Monitor a ten out of ten.

The scalability could be improved.

When we first started using it, we had four hundred different resources. Now we have four or five thousand different resources, it is not a scalable solution that automatically correctly adds devices where they belong, they are added to the end of the filter. They don't monitor appropriately; it's highly manual in terms of what and how it monitors.

We don't use their technical support. I would rate them a five out of ten.

It's a complex environment. The initial setup was just as complex.

I have not seen a return on investment.

Pricing is comparable. 

I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

Check the size of your infrastructure. If you have more than a thousand units or thousand devices to monitor, you should choose a better solution.

In my environment, I would rate PRTG Network Monitor a four out of ten.

We are primarily using this product for alerting. We receive notifications for events like the interface going up or down and remote access, as well as information such as the interface volume.

We're using the basics of it to monitor our switches and routers and primarily just the networking equipment for up-down status.

This solution makes it easy to group devices. It is easy when it comes to dependencies of devices, so if your router goes down, the three or four switches behind it will automatically be paused so that you don't get multiple alerts.

The maneuverability within it is fairly intuitive, especially once you get used to it.

I would like to see them take their graphing tools and convert them into a collector so that we can point telemetry to them. This is a general comment about all of the network monitoring equipment and I think that it would make the product more valuable in the long run. As it is now, you have to point telemetry at Kibana or another open-source solution and then graph out of that. I don't see the point of that, given that I've got SolarWinds and the choice of other network monitoring software. However, none of them allow you to use it as a collector for telemetry, so the stream is part of the switch.

I posed this question to PRTG and they were unresponsive, so it seems like not enough customers are complaining about it or would be potentially using it. But that's where I think in the long term, it would be of benefit. Licensing becomes an issue, and I understand that, but I think that if they could allow a collector of telemetry and re-displaying that graphically, it would be the next best thing.

If you don't have something that is doing the SNMP manipulation then it is a bit clunky, although they have good documentation on it. You can add as many SNMP MIBs as you want to, and it's just a matter of processing them into their format.

We have been using the PRTG Network Monitor for between three and four years.

This is a fairly stable product and we don't have to do a lot of maintenance. They do come out with patches and we're applying them. We do have to occasionally reboot it, although I'm thinking it's not nearly as buggy as SolarWinds. In this version of PRTG, I don't have any issues that I'm aware of.

Scalability is not bad and you can add extra to it. We don't have a scaling issue right now but from what I can tell, it appears that it can scale well.

We have used SolarWinds products and currently use them for backup. We have problems with stability and we fix them by rebooting the device. PRTG seems to be more stable, in general.

One of my senior engineers performed the initial setup. I am doing the maintenance on it along with my engineer. Applying patches if required is not something that we've had an issue with.

It's an annual license that is based on the number of endpoints that we're tracking and using.

We have created several maps for this product, and there is at least one map that people specifically use. It is put up on our wall for the helpdesk, and it has all of the switches and routers in a pie so that you can see what's down and what's up. It is a nice red, green, and blue color coordination. This is displayed along with the utilization of firewalls and our egress points, and some other critical points in the network for the service desk to look at. If they get several calls from a site and they can look up at the map and see that there is a bunch of red, possibly recognizing a network issue, then it is helpful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use PRTG because I have six clouds around the world, a mixture of our own and our customer data, so I need to know when it's all up and running and when it's dead. My team is the main point of call for all the infrastructure around the world. I get called out at all times during the night and day, including this morning at five am.

It allows me to spend less time firefighting and patching servers, and to spend more time with our customers, fixing their environments. Ironically, some of them have moved on to the monitoring tool as well. Time is the biggest thing that I have, and it's given me that back a bit. I'm no longer spending as many nights on call-outs as I used to, so for me it's been brilliant.

It also helps our IT department to be more cost-effective. Historically, people would build servers and they'd put far too much memory in them. When we would see that they're only using one percent, we'd know someone had specified far too much and been a bit cocky with what they were doing. It definitely helps to do tuning and save resources.

In terms of feedback on our IT infrastructure, it tells us when updates haven't been applied in a while, which is not a bad thing, especially with how Microsoft has been recently, breaking stuff. PRTG been great. It has let us know when a few of our SX servers have been having little issues, things you wouldn't necessarily notice under the covers unless you started hammering the system. It's definitely prevented downtime which, at the end of the day, is what we're after. It's done well.

One of its valuable features is the fact that it handles multiple operating systems. I've started moving over to Linux and away from Microsoft. Having the guys try to catch up on their Linux skills, it has been good to have a backup to make sure that we're not missing anything. It's definitely helped us a few times to make sure that stuff hasn't fallen over. And I like the fact that it tells me when things are about to fall over, which means I can preempt it and not have to wake up at three in the morning to fix it.

The Desktop app is good, although it's a bit in your face at times, but that is what you need. I normally just have it installed on a monitor in the background, so it doesn't keep flying up on my computer when I'm in the middle of an email. Other than that, it's really good.

The overall feature is set is very good. Originally, there were a few different solutions that we were looking at. I looked at the features that PRTG had and I bought it. I realized after I bought it that it could do a lot more than I wanted it to do, which was a godsend because I was looking for another bit of software to do just part of what it was doing. I managed to get a complete system. We don't use the ticketing side because we have our own ticketing from our managed services, but for other customers, big or small, I can see how it would help out massively.

It would be good if there were better graphical interfaces when you have it on multiple monitors. The way I use it is on multiple monitors so the department can see what's actually going on with the different geographies. It would make it an easier, visually, when they're working on emails or something else, to quickly work out if something is going on, without having an alarm saying that something needs doing. That's the one thing that is - I wouldn't say lacking - but the illustrations could be better for the different geographies. Because we have so many servers, things can get lost in the fog a little bit. Maybe having a better way of showing different geographies, Flash, etc., would help.

The stability has been great. It even says when to do a reboot, generally. I've only ever had a couple of issues where I've left it on for too many months without rebooting it and it's gotten its knickers in a twist, but other than that it's been absolutely fine.

The scalability is good. I know we don't push it to what it can do. The Remote Probe feature is definitely fantastic, especially with the different geographies we have. I can't really fault it too much. With the auto-updates it pushes out, it almost looks after itself.

The solution grows with our business. Having the miniature silo sites is very good. That's helped out quite a lot with keeping track of our clouds because we can have everything in a "tiered system." If we've got a customer who rings up and wants to check on something, we can easily navigate, see what's going on, do some predictive analysis, and then see if we can help the customer make their environment any better, or just make sure it doesn't blow up in the middle of the night.

We've only had to use technical support a few times, because everything's been pretty sorted. But when we have contacted them we've literally had a call back within half an hour and the problem has been fixed, or they've walked it through and told me to read the manual.

We used to use an old product called Servers Alive. It was good but very basic. It helped every once in a while, but it just didn't have anywhere near the kind of insights that you do with PRTG.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because I was getting stressed out and annoyed at the fact that I was getting called out so often, firefighting and fixing and stuff in the middle of the night, as well as doing the day job. I needed another pair of hands to be able to handle the infrastructure that was rapidly growing.

Downtime wasn't really a driving factor in our decision. We just upped and moved to the cloud. We wanted something that could keep an eye on what was going on in the back doors. That was one of the main reasons for the switch. We used to have a data center down in London, and driving down there to fix things up in the middle of the night wasn't exactly ideal. Although cloud is a little bit more expensive, regardless of what people tell you, it frees up time in the fact that you can literally rebuild stuff on the fly now, so much faster than you would if you had to procure servers. Having something keep an eye out to make sure all that is working in the background works for me.

The setup was so easy: 

• Insert IP address here. 
• Is this your password? - Yes.
• Do you have a VM server? - Actually, I do, thanks.

It then told me: "This is what you've got, and this is broken." Okay, thanks then.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure would have been about 12 hours.

I rang up and said, "I like your product," and within half an hour I had it downloaded and semi-configured and spent the next couple of days just tuning the environment. It's fantastic.

It has definitely saved the organization money. We see ROI from the fact that the company hasn't had to employ another person to back me up because I'm fixing stuff in the middle of the night. It's like having another admin there to help look at stuff.

The pricing is not too bad. It's not massively expensive, and the ability to upscale or even downscale licenses every year is brilliant for us.

I tried out a few of the free solutions, but I just couldn't get on with them. Since going with PRTG, we haven't bothered looking anywhere else because it has done whatever we've needed it to do.

Give it a try. You can do a lot with the free version that you download. But the sensors that you get with the extra packs make life so much easier because you can literally customize anything according to your whim, depending on your application or your data type. It has worked well.

In terms of the sensors and probes, there are a lot of them. It takes a while to go through them. It's probably a bit of overkill. It's a situation where if you have too many sensors running you end up knackering your network. But then again, it has the sort of metrics you're looking for. If you want to look at stuff like disk and CPU usage, or use the new stuff where it is monitoring your websites so you can pick out key elements, that's fantastic. But when it goes into bytes that the adapters are going in and out every second, that's a little bit much. Some people might want to look at that. But overall, there's so much that you can do with it. It's fantastic.

The historical data provided by the solution hasn't helped us optimize our network performance but that's because we change our infrastructure quite a lot. Historically, they would sweat the assets quite a lot, but we have moved a lot of our stuff to the cloud. So every couple of years, if we see a new operating system is out we'll migrate to it. I will have a quick look to see if there's anything that's been stolen, but we've got quite a good development team and we hope that serves us well. They're constantly upgrading it every couple of weeks, so it's always on the move. Where the solution does help is with the trends, to know what has been breaking so we can either move away from operating systems or spend a bit more money on the dev side of it to increase performance.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten because it has literally saved my bacon on numerous occasions in the middle of the night, making sure our production servers haven't gone out and caused our customers outages. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is that it's not exactly clear what some of the sensors are for, and because of the graphical interface. Other than that, as I'm using it over time, it's just getting better and better.

My primary use case for the PRTG solution is network device monitoring. For example, if one of my Ubiquity access points goes down, PRTG will send an alert so that I can go and try to restart it and bring it back up before people start complaining.

This product can be improved by updating the net flow interface. The one that is in place works – I can get all the information I need from it – but it is a little bit clunky.

I have not had any problems with the stability of this solution. I have to reboot it once a year, which is a chance for me to do the updates anyway.

The scalability of this solution has gone smoothly for me so far. I am mostly using it just for pings, and because I don't have a ton of net flows going into it, I am not heavily taxing it. We have a couple of thousand devices that it i monitoring and we have had no problems.

I never had a reason to be in touch with the tech support for the solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's an application that you can run on a Windows box. I have it running on a virtual Windows server, so it's not a standalone operating system, and it can come off as an application.

PRTG is relatively intuitive and fairly straightforward. It has net flow monitoring and that works all right. I would describe it as a decent middle-of-the-road solution. It costs about $500 a year, so if you're looking just to watch basic traffic and keep an eye on devices, it works fine.

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

I'm using the product on my virtual PC in a virtual environment. I use PRTG for monitoring the ping traffic. Whenever something goes down, it will alarm me, and maybe for the traffic and the bandwidth use as well. It helps me track traffic and uptime.

I really like the bandwidth, which is something critical for me. Whenever we argue over an ISP, we make sure that we have clarity of the bandwidth we are using.

The setup process is pretty simple.

The solution is scalable.

It's very stable. 

Limiting the bandwidth per host would be very good; however, that's beyond the capability of the PRTG. 

If PRTG could help me see the bandwidth for each host I have on my network, either for a wireless or a wired network, that would be very helpful.

We'd always welcome additional features. 

I've been using the solution for ten months. 

It's very stable. Whenever something goes down, or there's any change in the network, it will tell me. It'll send me an email. The SNMP feature is very helpful for me. It's very accurate over time.

We have just two users. However, we plan to expand the network and give people more access to the PRTG. Since we have all-time monitoring, someone should be online every second. Therefore, we will try to add more people and users.

It's very easy to scale the solution.

I have never actually been in touch with technical support. I have colleagues who have dealt with them. However, I have no experience with their services. 

I did not previously use a different product.

It was very easy for me to set up the product. They have this auto-discovery, and everything is online. Auto-discovery has helped a lot. So you don't have to go to configure everything individually. Everything will come up for you in just one click. 

If you have an enterprise, you should get help from PRTG pre-sale support as your setup may be a bit more complex.

In terms of ease of deployment, I would rate it 4.5 out of five. 

We don't really require any maintenance. Auto-discover should update automatically. If I need to add a custom sensor, then I just add it. 

I didn't have any outside assistance when it came to the implementation process. 

I just used YouTube and some online help from people that were not from the company.

I can't really speak to the licensing model. When we first signed up, there was some negotiation around pricing. Our purchasing department took care of that.

We have some sort of partnership with PRTG.

We are using the latest version of the product.

I'd advise people not to waste one more moment and start using it immediately.

I'd rate it ten out of ten.

We are using PRTG Network Monitor mainly for real-time monitoring and communication in our environment.

The most valuable feature of PRTG Network Monitor is real-time monitoring.

PRTG Network Monitor should improve the NetFlow dashboard, there is no flexibility, and the NetFlow is not meeting the business needs. Additionally, they are missing part of the configuration management.

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

PRTG Network Monitor is stable.

I did not face any issues with the scalability of PRTG Network Monitor. However, I did not test it.

There are approximately 17 administrators using this solution in my organization.

I have not needed to use the support from PRTG Network Monitor.

The initial setup of PRTG Network Monitor is simple. It took approximately 15 minutes to deploy.

We did the deployment of PRTG Network Monitor in-house.

There is a license to use PRTG Network Monitor and it is annually.

We have evaluated a lot of software and we found PRTG Network Monitor the best solution.

It's a good solution regarding real-time monitoring only, but for the site of the operation, you can't rely on it without any other solution to fit all use cases.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor a five out of ten.

We use it specifically for our network devices and service providers. We're able to know if the connection with a certain internet service provider is still alive.

It is able to satisfy all our requirements in terms of email notifications and specific errors on the devices.

I would like to have a VM version that can be installed on a cloud such as Azure. We're using Azure, and we're eliminating on-premise servers. It would be helpful to have a PRTG version that can be installed on the Azure cloud.

I have been using this solution for five to six months.

It is stable. So far, we didn't have any problem with the product.

We're using the free version, and we can only enroll up to 100 sensors. 

Currently, we have two system administrators who use this solution.

We didn't use their support. We're using the free version.

We were using SolarWinds. SolarWinds is much more expensive than PRTG.

For those who have no experience with PRTG, it would be quite complex. Luckily, we have an experienced and knowledgeable staff. Our team did not encounter any problems. The whole set up took two to four days.

We set it up ourselves. We had two system administrators for its deployment.

We are using the basic PRTG that we can download for free. For now, we only need to monitor less than 100 devices. For more than 100 devices, we would need to buy a license. PRTG is much cheaper than SolarWinds.

I would definitely recommend this solution. I have friends in other companies who are also using PRTG, and their feedback is also good.

I would rate PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten. We're happy with the results.