Pandora FMS vs. PRTG Network Monitor

I believe Pandora FMS is a solution that adapts to any type of scenario; it's useful for small businesses as well as large organizations. It more than meets the need to have a comprehensive monitoring system capable of sending alerts instantly and consulting historical data, logs, and trends. Additionally, for small businesses, the free version will be more than sufficient in most cases. And for those who do not want to deploy the service on-premise, there is an option for MaaS (Monitoring as a Service).

Incentivized

integrates seamlessly with Windows servers via WMI and PowerShell, providing deep insights into resource usage, performance metrics, and system health. It's excellent at tracking CPU, memory, disk space, and event logs, enabling rapid troubleshooting and proactive maintenance. PRTG Network Monitor also effectively monitors Fortigate devices, providing detailed data on firewall health, traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, VPN status, and security alerts. This visibility helps detect and resolve network security issues promptly.

Incentivized

• All-in-one software
• Flexible and easy configuration
• Multi-platform
• Design in PERL, CCS and HTML5

• Switch monitoring and finding out if there are communication issues or throughput alerts are reached
• Big picture view of the whole infrastructure and what is functioning and what is not
• Uptime tracking is great and lets us know for how long a device is down or overall uptime

Incentivized

• The interface is not intuitive due to the number of options it has and its organization.
• It has a free version with limitations, and another paid version. The commercial one has a quite high cost.
• It has a certain learning curve.

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

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 solution is very complete, and even includes extras such as IPAM.
Deployment can be a bit unintuitive at first, but once you become familiar with the solution and thanks to its automatic deployment options it ends up being easier than it seemed. The power and options of the solution are its greatest virtue.

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

The support team answers very quickly. They are always willing to find a solution to any need that is required by us or one of our clients.

PRTG does everything we need it to do and more. Ease of use, ease of management and maintenance and clarity of monitoring of hundreds of different types of device and service gives this a large advantage over other products on the market that I have tried. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a network monitoring product in their environment and even to people who don't know they need a solution yet!

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

Before using Pandora FMS, tests were carried out with all these tools:

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• IBM Tivoli
• PRTG
• SolarWinds

Pandora FMS allows simple customization by making adjustments to text files, developing agent add-ons without the need to be a programmer, there is no scenario where we could not take data and save it in PandoraFMS, IoT, industrial products, and everything that any client needs to monitor.

PRTG offers more versatility in monitoring when compared to the other solutions we tested. The other solutions were also limited as far as customization options, which made them less adaptable to our networks. When compared to Auvik, for instance, we prefer PRTG as it offers immediate notifications through the desktop client - not limited to email notifications as with Auvik. We also appreciate the fact that PRTG can be self/on-prem hosted vs Auvik's cloud model. This makes for an easier deployment and less firewall adjustments to allow traffic to cloud-hosted solutions.

Incentivized

• Substantial improvement in monitoring service. Detecting alerts on time always results in economic savings.
• Improvement in the periodic report associated with the capacity plan. The tool is indispensable in decision-making.
• Centralization and tool savings. Pandora FMS's versatility allows centralizing several functions into a single tool.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized