MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
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PRTG
Score 8.5 out of 10
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PRTG Network Monitor is the flagship offering from German software company Paessler, for monitoring local and wide area networks (LANs & WANs), servers, websites, apps, and more.
In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).
If there are a number of different protocols and devices to monitor PRTG is really an all in one solution. There are network specific solutions, telephony solutions, server solutions, etc - but this tool can do anything. Even if you don't use this tool as your main "monitoring solutions" every IT professional should have access to this tool for at least troubleshooting purposes. If you are looking for something specific built for a task you may be able to find [a] more direct and easy tool to use that would be easier and quicker to setup as customization is not needed.
Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.
Very, very configurable. You can create all kinds of monitors for all kinds of things. Plus it has loads of suggestions out of the box. It can get complicated but monitoring is complicated. Pretty decent interface and good support - active community.
I really liked how easy it was to add alerts by SMS. So easy to setup.
I like their sizing models (for purchase). We're actually small enough that we are free. But it's not free as in stripped down - it's free because we don't use many "sensors" and don't honestly have the need.
The probe service can be quite resource-intensive. This can cause false-positive readings from some sensors sometimes.
The software gets updated very regularly. Whilst this is usually a good thing to fix bugs etc, it does meantime downtime of the monitoring quite often while they are installed.
The ability to create Maps from Libraries. Very specific issue but a lot of people have been asking for it for years and it is still not available.
Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
The tool is very intuitive to use and it is Windows-based (everybody knows how to use Windows) so it's easy to get into. Every time is setup in a hierarchy so if you have a good initial hierarchy design, it will really reduce administrative effort down the road.
Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
I am giving this a 6 simply because I have never had to contact support. The online documentation is adequate for most things, and the user-maintained knowledgebase is excellent. The few times I have run into issues that were not easily resolvable with intuitive UI, I was able to find the answers that I needed either in the PRTG-provided documentation, the knowledgebase, or with a quick online web search.
Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
I have deployed and tested three products for evaluation I found [PRTG Network Monitor] very easy to deploy, the deployment literally took not more than one hour including basic configuration and network discovery. After deployment few configuration changes and creation of maps, reports and little tweaking is required. [Then] it would go through its process of recommendation that took some time to complete, while [on] other hand other software's took lot of time to install and configure. And features were also missing, which resulted in decision in favor of [PRTG Network Monitor].
The ability to analyze multiple pieces of information in one place, especially with historical data, has saved our IT department time and headaches. It would be so much more difficult to trace an issue without PRTG, just relying on event logs and an open task manager window.
The cost is not cheap, so it's an expense that hits the bottom line like everything else. Figure in hardware costs as well, ideally a server outside of your main environment.
I keep saying this, but the historical data piece is worth so much. There's really no good way to collect all of that information in one place without something like PRTG. And that definitely saves time and money in the long run.
