PRTG Network Monitor vs. SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM)

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

It is best suited for managing and monitoring homogenous networks where the design is similar across the board. The most obvious use case is to make sure the correct network quality of service is being maintained to ensure voice call quality in a converged networked. It would be less suited/necessary if the voice and data networks were segmented from each other.

Incentivized

• 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

• Quality of service monitoring.
• IP SLA Analysis.

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

• The impact on SolarWinds performance itself of configuring a large number of IPSLA operations for monitoring can be difficult to predict. It would be beneficial to have some tools that could warn or predict the results of doing so.
• Additional background information on the use case for each SLA operation type would be helpful to the user who may not be an expert in the field. The Server and Application Monitor product provides this benefit for application component monitoring.
• The tool should be engineered to allow repeated SLA node discovery for any and all nodes in the Orion Platform database.

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

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

Support is satisfactory.

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

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

Our VOIP system is from Cisco, so they suggested their Packet Tracer to help with managing our quality of service. We found it to be an extremely technical tool much better aligned with diagnosing a detailed issue rather than helping monitor and manage the VOIP traffic as Solarwinds does.

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

• VNQM has enabled our network engineers to see network quality issues from the end user perspective and thus be more proactive.
• The call records searching capability is very user friendly and has made it easy for VoIP engineers to troubleshoot call issues from a single pane of glass.
• We were able to implement SLA monitoring by leveraging an existing feature of our Cisco routers. No additional investment was required.

Incentivized