PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We primarily use the solution for applicative monitoring, or network and applicative monitoring for some customers so that they can make sure that all equipment is up, and sometimes we use it to look for some more accurate sensors.

Ergonomy is very useful to us. It was really easy to use. It's not really a feature, however, ergonomy and the way I could very simply makeup, let's say, basic monitoring, and then go much deeper when there is a need is helpful. 

The alerts are very helpful to have access to. 

The possibility to make maps is very valuable.

The initial setup is very simple.

So far, we've found the solution to be quite stable.

I don't really have opinions on what types of features should be added. I haven't seen anything really lacking.

The possibility to export the part of the sensor we made would be helpful. For instance, if you're doing monitoring for customers and we want to share this with them or bring them an on-premises tool as well for them, you can't export just one part. You have got to rebuild everything. Just to remake it on another premise, you've got to rebuild it from scratch.

I've been using the solution for three years at this point.

The stability is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance is reliable.

There are about 20 users handling this product.

We haven't really attempted to scale it in any way. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult the solution would be to expand.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We've been quite satisfied with the level of service we receive. We've found them to be very helpful and responsive when we have queries.

We are looking to take on other products. We are expanding, we are trying to share the two with other departments. As it often happens, the other departments say, "Well, why did you choose this and not something else?" And not
this or that?" Currently, we're looking into potential replacements.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not a complex process. A company shouldn't have too much trouble with the implementation process.

I can't say how long the deployment took. I can't recall the exact amount of time.

For maintenance, we update the solution regularly. That's handled internally by our team.

While the setup was handled internally, for the sensors, sometimes we had to reach out to the help desk for assistance. However, we did not use an integrator or consultant for the process.

I'm not an expert on pricing, however, I would describe the pricing as pretty cheap. It's not overly expensive.

I'm paying something like €1000 per year for the maintenance. I've got unlimited sensors.

Three years ago when we took PRTG, we had a trainee make a small inquiry and we concluded that regarding the needs we have today, PRTG was the best solution. We concluded at the time that it would be much easier to use. The technical gap between PRTG and the other solutions would not be relevant to how we planned to use it.

We're just a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with PRTG.

We're currently using the latest version of the solution.

Im not a network specialist, bu5 I would recommend PRTG. We've been extremely satisfied with its capabilities overall. I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is for monitoring infrastructure: servers, printers, endpoints, and certain services on certain systems. We are alerted in regards to any issue with them.

The remote probes are absolutely fine. They allow us to connect from sites. We have a few different sites spaced across the UK. The remote probes serve a purpose, like separating stuff logically, which is handy. 

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. Though, we had a few issues with a specific performance, we managed to pin it down because it wasn't throttling in any way. Seeing the history six months ago compared to what it was six months down the line, where there have been more computers put on the site, we could start slowly seeing the bandwidth increase. Then, we were able to identify what the issue is, and resolve it.

In general, we can see trends for a lot of different things, such as hard drive space and bandwidth usage. We can see and plan for the future by knowing, "We're sort of at 75% capacity now. In three months time, we know we're going to be up to 90%,so we need to plan ahead for it, getting upgrades booked in place." Since things like this take time and effort, it's handy to see trends into the future of where our company is going.

The nitty-gritty that you can get down to in terms of monitoring individual things. While seeing if the service or hard drives have halfway fallen out is fine, being able to monitor stuff with custom scripts (such as SQL scripts) and know whether your data warehouse is built in the morning, this is something which ticks all the boxes for us.

The sensors work as they should. There are hundreds of thousands of them with custom scripts that you can put out there to do different things, like file counts, monitoring SQL Server databases, and specific entries. There are a plethora of sensors out there that are really cool.

It gives us feedback on our servers. For example, we've an ERP server which we monitor for certain files, and it allows us to go back and see that we had an influx around dinnertime or lunchtime of a certain number of files, so this was a busy period. It also provides us the feedback to go back to the business, and say, "This is a busy period of the day for us. Are there any resources that we need to ramp up during that time?"

I would like a live chat solution. This would be useful and handy, especially with the ability to provide logs and an overview of what we are doing at that moment in time to get answers to our questions. 

The setup aspect of it  and getting devices working needs improvement. The reliance between different devices, so if one device goes down on Ping, the whole network will go down if the roots goes down. So, the time it takes to set that up is a bit more than I would have liked and is a bit cumbersome to actually go through. That's the only side that I can see a bit of improvement on. Some sort of relationship between devices, making that a bit easier to see what would be useful.

The stability is absolutely spot on, in terms that it will never go down. 

The only sort of limitation is the actual probes. So, if you don't have enough probes on there, you can over flip them and cause the WMI sensors and SNMP sensors to sort of overload. Sometimes, they might timeout for a minute, but they do come back. 

We have close to a 1000 sensors on it. I'm sure there are other people out there with a lot more sensors with bigger infrastructures than us. It performs absolutely fine if you have a site which has got a 1000 sensors on it. 

We can just add another probe onto another server on the site and extend that by doubling up the capacity on it. So, it can go as large as we want it to.

The technical support is very interactive. They've invited us to go down to the computer museum down in Milton Keynes, where they run trips. You can go down, they put on lunch, then have Q&A and a bit of a demo. They're very interactive people. They have active forums, as well. If you ask a question, it's not just the employees who will answer. Other key users like to get into the nitty-gritty stuff, which is really good.

We had sort of massive bandwidth bottlenecks, where our sites used VoIP telephonics. So, when something was throttling the bandwidth for one site, they wouldn't be able to make telephone calls. We had a few instances of that before we got the PRTG product in place.

We knew we need to invest in a new solution because of the amount of time that we were spending manually checking if devices were up or not, then troubleshooting those instances, and where devices went down. We realized that we could have seen these a lot earlier and spent a lot less time on them, thus allowing us to have more time to spend doing actual project work rather than dealing with the break/fix side of things.

The initial setup is as straightforward as you want to make it. You will get out of it the time that you've put into it. It's absolutely fine and straightforward to the point. It's only when you go into more specific stuff, like custom sensors, then you might need a little technical support, but they are always there to help.

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

We used a reseller to purchase it. However, we just sort of integrated it ourselves.

We have gotten weeks and hours back from using the product.

This solution enables our IT department to be more cost-effective. The time that you spend looking at stuff and monitoring services for updates, PRTG notifies you when stuff needs to be done. You could spend eight hours a week looking at stuff manually or you could just wait for PRTG to email you. Once you put in a couple of hours setting it up, it will just notify you to the business critical stuff, allowing you to plan ahead for your next week or month.

While I am not the person who deals with pricing, I would say that we pay around 1000 pounds a year.

We looked at PRTG and SolarWinds. From a cost side perspective, compared to PRTG, and from what you get back from it, PRTG was sort of a hands down the winner. We had read a few different reviews of PRTG and had a few of the colleagues that we'd worked with in the past who now used it at their new businesses and recommending it. These were sort of the main driving factors for going down that route.

Spend your time looking into PRTG and give it a trial. They're more than happy to give you a trial license for 30 days or so. Get it up and running on a certain site or system that you want to monitor just to see what you think of it. 

It is a very in-depth solution. You have to take the time to get it up and running the way you want. If you want it to be the best monitoring system, you have to put the time into it, such as creating a reliance on other sensors. E.g., if a ping sensor goes down, you're not going to get a response from the other sensors 99% of the time if the device isn't working.

They've spent a good amount of time refining and turning it into a really robust product.

We don't use the desktop app. We just use the web browser.

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.

PRTG Network Monitor is used to monitor internal network infrastructure servers. We use the solution to check to see if our equipment is up or down. 

The solution has helped our organization with proactive monitoring. It has made our infrastructure more reliable.

PRTG is a very flexible tool. The most valuable feature of this product is ping testing.

PRTG would be improved if it required less memory to run.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for five years.

This solution is stable. However, it does require a significant amount of memory to run.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable because you can offload the work to remote probes. We have 150 users in our company.

One person was required to deploy and maintain the solution.

I would recommend to anyone that is thinking of implementing this solution into their organization that they start out small and use the free version, or the 500 sensor. 

This product is a good solution, overall I would rate it an eight 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.