Paessler PRTG vs. SolarWinds Observability

It is well suited for an environment that deploys networking equipment and is needing monitoring 24/7. It works well to deliver real time data and alerts that are suited for taking action and notifying groups of members. It is less appropriate for use cases that involve only a few devices that don’t have dedicated teams looking for problems or uptime.

Incentivized

For mid-market and larger, HCO provides a highly available single pane of glass. The user and group management provides a granular ability to deploy to the various areas of the support and engineering teams. Integration to ITSM platforms ensures that information from the platform flows in real time to the right people.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• unlimited APEs included
• all modules under one platform
• overall cost savings when compared to buying multiple APEs and modules, NetFlow NCM, Ipam, etc.

Incentivized

• Licensing on a per entity basis can be cumbersome for devices which have a ton of monitoring points like network switches\routers. Each sensor may count against a license, which could be a lot of you were monitoring every TX\RX of an SFP for example
• A better method to easily template\copy monitors across devices
• The navigation in the web GUI could be a little more straightforward in terms of the hierarchy

Incentivized

• Please fix the time zones issue. Events are in UTC, Charts in the user's Local Time, Alerts come in through with Main Server timestamp - it's all over the place & it's been like that for so long. We are a large corp, the teams span time zones and trying to work with teams across the globe is made so difficult by this.
• The inability to ingest the tags from AWS Cloud watch and the countless posts / feature requests on thwack complaining about this that just get ignored. It's such a basic feature of Cloud & I don't want to have to own a different product to use such an fundamental part of cloud.
• Maintenance Windows - why can we not set a reoccurring window from the web ui in 2022?
• SAM - Manage applications, why is there no search bar to filter through applications. When you scale out to enterprise size this is so annoying trying to guess which page to land on to find the application / device I'm looking for.
• http://hostname/Orion/APM/Admin/Applications/Default.aspx
• Half baked features being released - Log Analyzer shipped with no resources for the node details page. The Free version from 2016 had more available in it.

Incentivized

I would renew it because the platform has brought us many technical and economic benefits that make the cost-benefit ratio very good. Additionally, to do so does not require large investments in training, licensing or infrastructure, and at the administration level, extensive knowledge is not required to be able to bear it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

- decent ease of use - good training materials - good documentation - acceptable level of expected knowledge

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's very important that de project's teams have different member of the TI. We have learned too late the importa of Security Analyst at the design architecture moment. We have to rebuild part of the implementation for made this big mistake.

Incentivized

When I evaluated Centreon back in 2014, it felt overly complex compared to PRTG Network Monitor. Centreon's configuration required deeper technical expertise, involving manual setup and extensive scripting. The interface seemed less intuitive and demanded more time to manage and maintain. In contrast, PRTG Network Monitor offered simpler sensor-based monitoring and a more user-friendly interface, which ultimately influenced my choice.

Incentivized

Solarwinds has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.

Incentivized

• PRTG has definitely had a positive impact on the business as monitoring can all be done from a central location and is easily accessible by all the relevant stakeholders.
• It can easily give us stats on up time etc which is used for statistics and SLA monitoring etc - this provides customers with detailed information which we wouldn't' otherwise be able to provide.
• For the price, I think it is the best product available on the market

Incentivized

• Helps us maintain application availability
• Helps us shorten unplanned downtime
• Provides these benefits at a fair price

Incentivized