Overview
What is PRTG?
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.
TrustRadius Insights
PRTG Network Monitor an amazing tool for sysadmins
Some of my experiences with Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG is a need to have tool for IT
Network Monitoring above others
Perfect for EASY customization!
- Device …
Don't pass on Paessler's PRTG Network Monitor
We needed a more robust …
Small Scale Low Budget Monitoring Solution
PRTG Network Monitor: A turnkey, fire & forget solution!
Complex but flexible network monitoring software
PRTG NMS easier than you think.
Fast, similar and low-cost network monitoring with PRTG
PRTG Network Monitor Review
Before PRTG we used …
Light Weight Network Monitoring Tool
The right size for everyone
Awards
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Popular Features
- Alerts (55)7.676%
- Network monitoring (54)7.676%
- Automated network device discovery (49)7.474%
- Hardware health monitoring (52)6.868%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
PRTG 500
1,750
PRTG 1,000
3,200
PRTG 2,500
6,500
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
PGT 305 : MINI PROJECT - DEMO VIDEO PRTG NETWORK MONITOR
Prtg demo | Prtg network monitor demo | Prtg
Giám sát mạng máy tính với phần mềm PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor Demo
PRTG Network Monitor Live Demo
Monitor Large Scale Environments the Easy Way - PRTG Network Monitor
Features
Network Performance Monitoring
A network performance monitoring system monitors the entire network for performance problems and collects performance data such as network traffic analysis performance bottlenecks, etc.
- 7.4Automated network device discovery(49) Ratings
Automated network device discovery allows all devices in the environment to be found and tracked
- 7.6Network monitoring(54) Ratings
Monitoring network device availability and performance indicators like bandwidth, packet loss, CPU, WAN links, etc.
- 6.6Baseline threshold calculation(47) Ratings
Calculation of baseline thresholds so to establish warning thresholds
- 7.6Alerts(55) Ratings
Alerts warning of critical infrastructure component failure can be sent via email or SMS or other channel
- 6.6Network capacity planning(39) Ratings
Capacity planning analyzes interface utilization, disk usage, etc. and allows identification of capacity problems well in advance of threshold breach
- 5.3Packet capture analysis(28) Ratings
Interception of data packets provides performance-related information such as network and application response times, and traffic type analysis
- 7.5Network mapping(39) Ratings
Dynamic mapping tool allows the network topology to be mapped showing performance metrics, and link connection and utilization
- 7.4Customizable reports(48) Ratings
Ability to schedule, generate, and deliver custom performance and availability reports
- 7.3Wireless infrastructure monitoring(38) Ratings
Ability to monitor wireless access points, controllers, and connected clients
- 6.8Hardware health monitoring(52) Ratings
Ability to monitor key hardware metrics including temperature, fan speed, and power supply
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is PRTG?
PRTG Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(234)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
PRTG Network Monitor is a versatile tool that has proven to be invaluable for a wide range of users and organizations. Small and mid-sized firms with limited IT resources have found it to be an effective solution for monitoring their servers, switches, storage, and essential services almost 24/7. By providing a quick overview of many systems at once, the software saves these organizations from receiving alerts from multiple places or watching several different screens.
Telecommunications companies also benefit greatly from PRTG Network Monitor's capabilities. It allows them to monitor major backhaul telecommunication links, thousands of devices deployed in multiple locations, and even multi-tenanted virtual environments. The software's event monitoring, alerting, capacity management, and uptime reporting features provide these companies with the metrics they need for OLAs and SLAs.
Similarly, organizations rely on PRTG Network Monitor to keep a close eye on their network devices, servers, and services both locally and remotely. By providing real-time information about the system's health and alerting the team when something goes offline or down, the software enables proactive issue resolution and quicker recovery. The ability to display the software on TVs throughout the department also allows other employees to see the status of the infrastructure.
In various industries, such as R&D departments or customer service centers, PRTG Network Monitor serves as a crucial fault and performance monitoring tool. It helps these teams monitor services, databases, bandwidth utilization, server performance, and application uptime. The historical data provided by the software aids in tracking trends and establishing baselines for resources. Notably, its flexibility in configuration and customization is appreciated by users across different settings.
PRTG Network Monitor is not limited to specific sectors but offers value to many use cases. From monitoring network gear and VPN tunnels to overseeing classroom environments or casinos' game floors' kiosks, this software proves its versatility time and again. Its extensive functionality allows users to consolidate multiple monitoring systems, meet customer SLAs, and proactively address potential problems before they impact users' experience. PRTG Network Monitor truly shines as a reliable and adaptable tool for network monitoring and system availability.
Intuitive Interface: Users have consistently praised PRTG for its highly intuitive interface, which makes it incredibly easy to use and set up credentials and device monitoring. Many reviewers appreciate how the user-friendly interface streamlines the process of navigating the system.
Out-of-the-Box Monitoring: PRTG's comprehensive monitoring capabilities right out of the box have impressed numerous users. The product offers detailed monitoring without requiring extensive customization or additional packages, saving valuable time and effort during implementation.
Automatic Device Discovery: PRTG's automatic device discovery functionality has received positive feedback from several users. They highlight how this feature simplifies the setup process by automatically detecting and modeling various types of devices, ensuring hassle-free monitoring with minimal manual configuration required.
Confusing User Interface: Some users have found the user interface to be perplexing, difficult to navigate, and lacking in intuitiveness. They have expressed a desire for improvements in the management of the user interface, including visual interfaces and simplification of the top ribbon menu.
Steep Learning Curve: There is a learning curve associated with using the software, especially for those who are new to monitoring solutions. Users have reported difficulties with the setup process and the auto scan feature, and they would appreciate a more straightforward navigation system in the web GUI.
Expensive Pricing Structure: Many users find frustration with the pricing structure since costs increase significantly once they exceed the 100 sensor limit of the free version. The licensing cost is considered expensive, particularly for small businesses. Users feel that there should be a more budget-friendly software option available for medium-level customers.
Users recommend purchasing a licensed version of the software for proper functioning. They have found that the licensed version offers better performance and functionality compared to the free version.
Reviewers advise regularly updating the software to resolve any bugs or issues. By keeping the software up-to-date, users have access to the latest features, enhancements, and security patches.
Customers suggest engaging with the user community for troubleshooting assistance. By exploring the user community, users can find solutions to their queries or problems more quickly and benefit from shared tips, tricks, and workarounds.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-19 of 19)Perfect for EASY customization!
- Device monitoring (Security, network, telephony, servers, power)
- Device troubleshooting (monitoring statistics of problematic device which could be any network connected device) over time to determine a baseline and solve problems
- Reporting on network utilization for capacity planning
- Netflow reporting for external connections
- Ability to monitor ALMOST anything that is network connected
- Flexibility in monitoring choices (SNMP, Scripts, PINGS, WMI etc)
- Easy to use web GUI for creating monitors, reports, and alerts
- 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
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.
- Allows for very easy agentless additions of monitors.
- Gives simplified views and customizable dashboards in the WUI.
- Gives excellent outputting/exporting options for structured historical data.
- The WUI overall, although it is thorough, could use some simplification to find what you are looking for.
- The WUI could also give better dependency linking, the existing tool is difficult to use.
- An HTML5/more enhanced/more interactive UI design.
Complex but flexible network monitoring software
- Ping for general availability of servers every constant time interval.
- By doing so, we can check statistics of availability over a period of given time.
- You can set different monitors for different needs.
- The UI is very "old" and not appealing.
- It's also not intuitive enough, UX-wise.
PRTG NMS easier than you think.
- Ping Jitter to identify connection problems
- Traffic monitor for monitoring performance of wan links
- Snmp sensors
- Maps are difficult to make
The right size for everyone
- Prompt notifications when a device goes down.
- Beautiful history graph showing you uptime/statuses
- Interface is a little difficult to navigate if you aren't tech savvy.
- Configuration of hierarchy can take a bit of time to set-up.
- Very easy to setup new sensors (new endpoints to monitor).
- High level of customization for various features.
- User-friendly, intuitive web UI.
- Documentation could be a little more thorough/easy to understand.
- Built-in reports could be expanded a little bit more.
- Does not support SSO or more than one Active Directory sync.
- Being able to customize sensors for each server or application (what is being monitored)
- The variety of hardware and software sensors to choose from is great.
- The accuracy of the sensors. If PRTG is reporting a problem then that event is really happening.
- We can choose the thresholds for each sensor. So for example what is a down state or warning state.
- A lot of options regarding notifications - email, text, timeframes, normal business hours, weekend hours, etc.
- Ability to see and report on sensor history and get uptime stats.
- There is a reporting feature but the reports are not necessarily "pretty".
- The learning curve isn't real steep but it can be a little difficult to configure and get things the way you want them. Definitely trial and error.
- The automatic scan of a server includes a lot of sensors that are not really usable. And considering licensing is based on the number of sensors, it's easier to just pick the sensors you want to monitor. It would be nice if could create a template of sensors to track.
PRTG for MSP's
- System Monitoring
- Server Monitoring
- Network Monitoring
- UI can be confusing
- Notifications can be difficult to set up
The perfect tool for the little guy
- Consistent, real-time alerts.
- A decent repository of MIB's and OID's for quick auto-discovery.
- User-friendly interface.
- Its MIB library could be expanded by quite a lot, I have to spend a lot of time with device manufacturer support when I need to monitor something specific (fan speed, firmware version, etc).
- It's really not that scaleable beyond 10,000 sensors.
The biggest problem we used to have was that we had several monitoring systems managed by different departments around the business. With the introduction of PRTG, we have been able to consolidate these systems into PRTG and manage it centrally.
PRTG gives us a really good visual overview of all the relevant things we need to monitor to meet customer SLA's and we find that with the help of the email alerts and a visual map on a large screen in the office, we can keep on top of any issues.
- Visual overview of the whole network making it easy to spot any issues straightaway.
- Email alerting that is fully customizable.
- Proactive monitoring using hundreds of different types of sensors giving the ability to actively troubleshoot issues before customers are affected.
- 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.
The only place where it would be less appropriate would possibly be an environment where multiple probes were required for geographic purposes and a probe device (ie, a PC) isn't available in each location. This is fairly unlikely, however, but would depend on the network infrastructure.
Monitoring Tool for every business
- Easy to use
- Very powerful sensors
- Create custom sensors (SQL, Powershell etc.)
- Good support from paessler
- A lot of KB articles
- In some points limitated (You cannot change a sensor, you have to delete them)
- Create a SQL sensor is not that easy
- You have to search in your system language (Example. In German RAM is called "Arbeitsspeicher" so when you search for RAM he will not find the sensor)
PRTG monitors everything, even my enthusiasm
- Monitoring: PRTG does more than just periodic pings to see if a system is up, it has all sorts of sensors to monitor CPU usage, memory, hard drive space, specific processes, &c. It's very granular and quite robust in its capabilities. But it isn't overwhelming, as you can set up which sensors you want or don't want.
- Ease of Setup: PRTG can discover new systems, and automatically apply templates to their profile. This means, for example, a new server on the network will always get a CPU, RAM, Hard Disk, and Network sensor if you set it up that way. Even the default templates are pretty great, not a lot of extraneous sensors that clutter everything up.
- Dashboard: One of the best things about PRTG is that all this information is in one place. The dashboard view shows everything in a color-coded way, so everything is green, no worries! Yellows and reds, they stand out. From there, you can drill down and find out which specific things are in alarm without necessarily having to log in to the system.
- Alerts: PRTG also sends out e-mail alerts based on whatever parameters you configure. A hard drive is 90% full? Email the infrastructure team!
- Historical Data: Because PRTG monitors all of these systems in real time, all the time, it maintains a database of historical performance data. You can check to see which servers need more resources, or even if it's just a specific time (e.g., development always runs a database query at 2:30 pm, and you can see what that does to the CPU). It's extremely helpful for analysis.
- Horizontal Dashboard: The dashboard page is responsive, which is a good thing generally, but it works much better on a vertical monitor, especially if you have a lot of systems to monitor. If you have a horizontal layout, you have to scroll often to keep track of things (although the alerts do help). It would be nice to have an option to force a specific scale and layout.
- Database: The database PRTG uses is an internal black box. It would be nice if it were something more standard, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, &c. That way it could be tied into other things more easily, or we could write our own SQL queries against it.
- E-Mail: The internal SMTP server of the application is not always reliable. It took a lot of tweaking to get it to send alerts correctly.
That said, a small business, especially one with one or two servers and a couple of switches, probably won't find it cost effective. There would be less value in that kind of small shop to monitor everything this way, and one of the free solutions out there would probably be fine.
Easily monitor your network with PRTG
- There are many preconfigured probes to use for all types of network equipment and servers
- Alerts can be customized and configured to alert the right staff for the specific alert
- Graphs make it easy to spot trends for all probes
- Auto-discovery makes adding devices easy
- The mobile app gives you access to the system from anywhere
- Alerts configuration is a little tricky to fine tune and could be easier. It can be very granular(good), but that adds to the complexity.
- Mobile app could be a little better laid out
PRTG Network Monitor - Good value solid monitoring.
Pricing was important to us but more important was ease of use, and although perhaps not as powerful as some of its competitors, PRTG handles large infrastructures well, and is particularly quick and easy to deploy, without the need for complex client installations.
- Rapid real time monitoring
- Great price performance
- Ease of implementation and deployment
- Very easy to configure and add / amend / remove nodes and alerts.
- Good level of support from the vendor.
- Highly customisable.
- Ease of deploy,ent to different skill sets - i.e. HD usage, etc.
- More refined SNMP support - Little bit too technical and hands on to use as fully as you want to.
- Built in native support of more manufacturers
- Ability to run the console on a MAC, without using a browser.
- Small and medium to medium large enterprises.
- Organisations with highly mixed environments.
- Those looking for great value.
PRTG - YOUR Network & Device Monitoring Platform
- Alerting you to changes in statuses
- Customization and granular tweaking
- Installation and setup is a breeze
- Maintaining and growing PRTG is super easy
- Sometimes there is A LOT of information to digest
- Sometimes finding out how to name your alerts/metrics is tough
- More followup/personal touch from PRTG sales
- Excellent graphs and eye candy.
- The software can be used on small footprints like devices on the Pine64.
- There is very little overhead on the product. You install out of the box and do a walk-through configuration.
- I would like to see labs done where actual real alarms could be observed.
- Although they have mapping software for dashboards, it doesn't look as easy as it should.
- There is a huge learning curve to interpret everything you are seeing.
PRTG Rocks
- PRTG appears to be plain and simple and you can use it that way if you want. But it has power under the hood and can be used to monitor anything you can think of. I like the fact that it's simple to use, it's truely as easy as auto discover, tweak and forget (or wait until you get PRTG notices via email).
- Alarms are easy to use and you can set them to be granular by error or by group/users.
- PRTG upgrades are a snap with auto update.
- I've set up PRTG in a cluster so that we don't have to log when we take the server down for maintenance for reporting on uptime, etc. Cluster setup is very easy.
- In a previous job, I posted public pages to our IT intranet page so employees could see if there was a server outage. Again, very easy and a nice idea.
- Reporting isn't as nice as I would like it to be. Nothing specific really, but depending on the report it can take quite a bit of time to generate, more time than expected. I think it would also be nice to make it more granular with more presentation options.
- The Desktop application is not as easy and nice as the web interface. I'm a big fan of the web interface and I would consider not even deploying it.
- I really like the notifications, but fine tuning it so that you get reports too often or not enough can take some time. I think the defaults don't work for everyone and making sure you are aware of that can prove embarrassing if you are not on top of it or prepared to explain the notices to everyone you send them to... e.g. IT director.
- The maps have improved greatly over the years. I think there is still room to make them even better. I wish they had a grid view and a way to select all objects and size them equally and alighn them or snap to grid.
Use PRTG? Why not; it's free!
- Easy to implement. It almost sets itself up through guidance from you to get you quickly monitoring your network.
- We were able to easily find a communications problem through the sensor which was deployed.
- 100 sensors are included free for life. Why not implement this product just to have this ability.
- Sometimes the areas to add / remove sensors can be a bit confusing.
- It is hard to find where to move a monitored device from one group to another. I had to look this one up in their documentation.
- Better AD integration for use in establishing security roles with PRTG. It is hard to verify it is working properly.
PRTG for Remote Server Monitoring
- It has an easy to use interface, that requires no training to use.
- A user can create custom reports and alerts for each server being monitored.
- The system requires little maintenance to keep working properly.
- The web interface can be a little slow to work with.
- It can be difficult to find specific settings needed to configure different nodes.
- There are multiple interfaces, and it can be hard to change into the interface that is best for each user.