What needs improvement with PRTG Network Monitor?

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.

The technical support from PRTG needs significant improvement. The support team should be more accessible when customers log a complaint, and the process of accessing support should be easier for end users. Additionally, the cost has increased from $4,000 to $99,000 without any change in features, which is unacceptable.

PRTG Network Monitor could improve interaction with customers by offering direct support involvement instead of just mail responses. The solution could also enhance database observability and provide clearer pricing explanations when converting customers from perpetual to subscription models.

When you email the support team, they take three to seven days to respond and resolve simple issues.

PRTG Network Monitor needs to show bandwidth utilization in proper graphs. It isn't easy to learn.

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.

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.

Along with more room for automation, more room for advanced configuration can be integrated into the solution.

They should work on syncing the solution with Gmail. Also, they should add a feature to monitor the bandwidths of different devices. In addition, it should be possible for us to check the connectivity of the devices via DNS servers.

PRTG does not allow us to scan devices like we can scan software or another problem in it. Also, I cannot draw graphical graphs in Woodview/look. Another problem is that we cannot draw a good diagram in PRTG. In the next release, I'd like to see more integration with, for example, SolarWinds.

PRTG could use reporting tools and mobile alert tools. It should be easier to diagnose and respond to problems from a mobile device on the go.

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.

PRTG Network Monitor could develop more tie-up sensors so that we can get more detail on the monitoring system. We have a lot of tie-up devices, and many of them we cannot monitor. However, we have to go to the price of this product to monitor them. I hope that in the future, Paessler could develop more sensors. Sometimes, our PRTG Network Monitor system crashes and a lot of sensors go down. I have to reboot the prop to get the system back to normal. I would like PRTG Network Monitor to add backup abilities. The solution can be more stable. The technical support needs improvement.

Here's an area for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor: my company needs to perform SNMPv3 monitoring, and by default, SNMPv2 is there. From a security point of view, SNMPv3 monitoring needs to be stronger. Otherwise, it'll reduce performance when you need to monitor it at the server level. It'll impact performance, including the PRTG Network Monitor performance. If my company does a large number of SNMPv3 queries, that will reduce server performance, so PRTG recommends not scanning or monitoring a massive amount of SNMPv3. If PRTG Network Monitor can evolve into agent-level configurations rather than server-level configurations, where you can install the agent on the server and the agent provides the necessary feedback, that would improve the tool. Performance-wise, PRTG Network Monitor still needs improvement because a large number of SNMPv3 queries reduces tool performance. It could also impact the server level. If the monitoring method for PRTG Network Monitor could be similar to other OEMs, such as SolarWinds, where the agent is on the server and provides server performance information to the main console server, that would be great. Another area for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is reporting. For example, if you want the report or the dashboard in a particular format, you'd need to exert some effort. You cannot do it without the support of the vendor or an expert. As a customer, you cannot configure PRTG Network Monitor reports independently because reporting is difficult.

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.

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

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.

PRTG Network Monitor can improve by adding prevention and detection features.

There are some restrictions for usage and sales that need to be ironed out for the country of Congo. I would like the ability to monitor Cisco IRS devices.

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.

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.

PRTG Network Monitor could improve the price.

A room for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is its sensors. Its application technology sensor, such as the IAS, .NET, etc., needs some improvement because it doesn't work as expected. For example, the IAS sensor doesn't give immediate information, and the information you get from it isn't of good value. The web GUI of PRTG Network Monitor also needs improvement because errors keep popping up if it's not been updated to the latest version. What I'd like to see in the next release of the tool is end-to-end topology mapping for the business model, and that should be required. There has to be a technical map. Technical mapping and topological creation are missing in PRTG Network Monitor, so I would like to see those in the future.

The technical support service should be improved and is not as good as Cisco. However, PRTG support is better than before as they now have remote and TeamViewer support. Before, it was only based on mail communications and forum discussions. Irrespective of this improvement, the technical support response time is still prolonged, and the reservation can be better. I rate the response times a six out of ten. We've had very good experiences with Check Point, Juniper, and Cisco technical support. Regarding additional features, currently, the default database has some limitations. There is a specific capacity that it can trigger. So, if they can make the enterprise-grade DV integrated, then a separate part will be needed to integrate. We want to customize every six months and do not need data older than six months. It is the best solution. Personally, in my 20 years of experience working with monitoring systems, this is the best. Their software is very light and fast. Everything is great except the technical support response time. If they improve this, I'm sure it will be a top-class product competitor.

When using PRTG Network Monitor it is beneficial if you have prior experience with it, the user interface could improve.

PRTG Network Monitor can improve Layer 2 and Layer 3 network maps and the GUI more user-friendly. Additionally, they should bundle the features so I can monitor everything on one particular device.

PRTG Network Monitor can improve the reports. In the reports, you have to give an alert for that SMS and email, the emergency calls and downtimes have to be reported accordingly. You have to enable email services or an SMS gateway service to receive more alerts at the proper time.

In the next release, PRTG Network Monitor should add a backup solution.

PRTG Network Monitor could improve by having descriptions for the tab usages. The dashboards or interface could be easier to understand.

The operations dashboard is only available in PRTG's enterprise version, but I wish it could be accessed in the standard licensing. It would also be nice if PRTG had templates for dashboard monitoring, software monitoring, etc. It can help me set up a dashboard because now we don't have a template from PRTG, so we need to create one from scratch.

This solution is a good product so far, but I haven't been using it long enough to know how it could be improved.

From a view perspective, it should be more customizable. Other monitoring tools that I have used are easier to use.

More training videos for installing and configuring PRTG Network Monitor would have been nice, especially when working with a lot of devices.

PRTG Network Monitor is okay to use, but you need some time to analyze the data, so this could be an area for improvement. If this solution has the feature of automatically locating or identifying the problematic area, it would be helpful to customers. This is a feature I'd like to see in the next release.

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

PRTG Network Monitor can improve by having better integration with devices.

The automation should be improved. I am talking about automation by code and processes and provisioning the IP desk. Should the automation capabilities be addressed, I would raise my rating from an eight to a ten out of ten.

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.

The database needs improvement. They use plain text for the data. That's probably not a concern for them, however, sometimes we need to enhance some of the reports and we cannot do that. If they move to a transactional database, it will be better for users to get access to different kinds of reports. Right now, it's pretty straightforward in terms of what you can do, and you cannot apply customization or get specific data. They have something called maps where you can configure or set up a view for the different devices. They have different options than the ones that we have, such as a pie chart option, and likely offer different kinds of graphs. It would be nice to show you the real-time status using these graphs.

Integration into service management ticketing systems could be better. They should simplify the integration into big service management platforms like ServiceNow, Remedy, and Cherwell. They're really into monitoring, but they don't do any self-resolution. It would be better if the company moved more into the AIOps space so that you could actually kick off some remedies. I know that you can execute some commands from the tool, but you need to develop those all yourself. It would be really handy if they had some auto-remedy scripts that they could develop on top.

PRTG's documentation could be improved.

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

I'd like to see the inventory of the device improved.

In our organization, we encounter performance issues with our PRTG probe service. I saw documentation from the vendor or Paessler mentioning that there are limitations for WMI sensors. Other than that, we are okay with PRTG.

The traffic, the status of the devices can stand improvement. Moreover, I would like to see network mapping.

I get messages from all the things that happened, and we are informed about issues after that fact. We need something that is more predictive. We would prefer if it wasn't a solution that was corrective and instead offered predictive insights so that we can handle problems before they even occur. We are using EMC storage and we are finding that it is difficult to implement monitoring for it for some reason. If they could work to make that easier, that would be ideal. It should work with commonly used equipment and offer more templates. Every time there is an update, the templates should also be updated as well.

There is room for improvement in this solution for the performance and third-party monitoring protocols. They need to be updated to the latest ones.

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.

The solution could be better and faster when it comes to performance.

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.

The technical support could respond a little bit quicker. A better console would be an improvement.

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

The free version only gives us 100 free sensors to use. It would be nice if there was double that. The additional services such as MS SQL and email monitoring took a bit of work, so I would like to see it easier to do.

Their penetration within the market could be much better. If their pricing was lower, even though it's reasonable now, it might help them achieve this. The solution needs a better graphical grid. A good example of what I mean is SolarWinds, which has an excellent graphical grid. It would help with organizations that have a bit more complexity.

The option to perform cross-correlated information about the server, I think could be better. This tool doesn't have this. The ability to get another license if you need another tool, or to license specific aspects that may not be covered under your existing license could be better. Right now, it's not easy to switch contracts. The licensing policy needs more flexibility. There may be some scalability issues.

Network monitoring is not the strongest area of the solution which should be improved. It is not the best tool of the application but if someone has to start from the beginning and reach a moderate level of abilities for monitoring, then PRTG still serves that purpose. For experts, it is not the application monitoring tool they would choose. This tool is more suited for beginners and intermediate users. The solution has to evolve as an end-to-end monitoring solution. It has to do better at understanding the application at the deepest level. The performance of the monitoring is outdated and when they have upgraded the tools in the past, it slows down the performance. Auto Discover features could improve by allowing people the choice to manipulate the discovery to design and customize it to create a technical map of the services dependent on each of them. They should also add service monitoring. They currently have a Windows service, but they do not have monitoring as a separate service. If I would like to specifically monitor the service within Windows, I would have no choice but to use theirs.

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.

Its price can be better. Its price is a problem for us because it is in dollars, and there is a high conversion rate. In terms of new features, it can have BGP monitoring. It should also have a dashboard and maps editor.

It needs to have more monitoring on end-user devices. We can monitor a set of network devices, but not end-users' devices. It would be nice if it gave us alerts via Gmail or SMS message.

I don't believe there is much need for improvement. The product is constantly improving. I used to think that the reporting could be quicker, but presently, there is a solution for that, thanks to the SLA plug-in from CORP-IT. The basic reason why PRTG reportings were slow is due to the fact that the reporting engine is built-in as a functionality in the PRTG application. The application does a lot of things, like monitoring and managing the database and it updates your dashboard in real-time. The last priority goes to the reports. Typically, reporting can wait if there are demands on other aspects of the product, but because of this, the reporting was becoming too slow because it was always the last priority. I used to think that needed to be improved but the formal plug-in has solved this issue. Some customers don't mind the slow reporting, as not everything is urgent. However, if you want faster reporting, the options are available. Maybe in the future there will be room for improvement, but currently, there is nothing pressing that I can think of.

The solution could be improved by increasing the way that it polls the different engines which we feel is quite slow. It also doesn't integrate very well with service desks or anything else. Pre-packaged integrations with other product sets would be something we'd like to see in any future release.

Because our system doesn't connect to the internet, it wants us to put in the license and then the activation should occur. Sometimes we do the activation when we are passed date. When we try to activate the license past date, it's not as easy as we thought it should be. In other words, they could improve the process of updating the license. If I do it correctly before the activation expires, it should be okay. But if I try after the due date has passed then you can't get the correct security patch. I would prefer if PRTG could work in redundancy mode with an external database rather than how it is now with the database inside PRTG, where I can access it only through the report. If you have an external database you can do another trace on the data with the redundancy while the monitoring system is still going on.

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.

I don't like the desktop app and never use it. The web client is far easier to navigate with the notifications that pop up. The web app comes with everything that you need. I preferred the look and feel of the previous version's user interface. I would like to see more from an Office 365 standpoint, getting a more nitty-gritty app. I am not sure the solution is giving me all the needed feedback that we need. When something goes off on our IT infrastructure, it does tell me. However, it would be nice if it gave more intuitive information, e.g., the hard drive has gone up by 60 percent in an hour.

There seems to be a big jump from the basic scan to the really thorough scan. There is a big jump in the quantity of sensors it uses for certain things. One minute you might get ten and then the next you get 200. There seems to be a big jump between the two at times.

It probably has this already, but if it had a mobile app that would be helpful. For example, on a day like today when I'm out, if I could just fire it up and see green, green, green, green, green or red, that would be good.

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 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.

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.

The Desktop app is good but it can be really sluggish at times, especially when you're editing different elements. If they could speed up the way you maneuver around different OUs that would be really good. The map creator is quick blocky. It's not very user-friendly. Also, when doing an auto-discovery, I wish that there were an approval stage. If you pick "full detail scan", it comes back with everything, and then you have to go back and delete them bit by bit. If there were an approval saying, "These are ones that are available," you just go click, click, click and be done. That would be great.

In terms of sensors and probes, it would be really cool if PRTG had a purely Azure-based solution. We had to install a probe on one of our cloud servers and then let that probe out from there. It would be really cool if it just monitored Azure without having to install something on the device.

Sometimes, it is difficult to drill down further to get information, e.g., if we saw spike in traffic, then we would want to drill down and find out what is causing that spike in traffic. Now, it could be because of the way we're using it, but we find that it' difficult to do, which is why we are using another product for this. SolarWinds has server application monitors (SAMs), which we are using to check our processes on critical systems to see if they were to go down that we would get an alert for it. Because it's all network-based, it would be great if this was something that we could have included.

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 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.

They just released a newer version of the desktop app, a beta version, that I have been trialing out. I prefer the older version, only because of how the layout is designed, but they're making improvements to it all the time. The clustering aspect needs improvement, as there is a bit of confusion about you do when hit that 5000 probe mark. I would like there to be more cloud features with cloud stats. However, in every update, there seems to be more things add. I would also like there to be more APIs and access to them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although they are fairly comprehensive with what you can do with them, the mapping and dashboards are a bit clunky to set up. I would like a more straightforward ability to create dashboards and maps. The network maps should be a bit more flexibility in the GUI to do what we need to do.

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.

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 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 would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us.

Sensors are out-of-the-box and provide some good coverage, but we have a lot of custom sensors, as well. With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied.

While the web application side of things is fantastic, the desktop app is the one area where it do with some improvement. From a user's perspective, I would like to be able to get more out of the desktop offering as opposed to where we are now with it. It could be stronger. There are opportunities there that you don't have with the web-based application to do some interesting and innovative stuff. An important thing is to keep up with the technology which is now coming out. There is obviously a lot of generic stuff in the solution, and there is also a lot of new tech which is coming out that people need to be able to monitor.

I would like to see a more robust platform and a new dashboard. In addition, the code is good, but it needs improvement.

We would like to monitor certain aspects of the user experience. We should be able to analyze the cause of end user experience, bad or good, so we can do some research and development on our own. In a very few cases, customers want more detailed reports, which we cannot meet.