PRTG Monitoring System
August 14, 2019

PRTG Monitoring System

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG was used to monitor small to medium environments. It is being used by a department to monitor segregated instances which we do not monitor in our main monitoring tool. It enables us to quickly and easily add devices to monitoring and receive email alerts for availability and performance issue.
  • Simple and Intuitive: PRTG is very easy to use and get into. Its interface is highly intuitive and allows you to very quickly set up credentials and add devices to monitoring.
  • Low customization effort required: immediately out of the box, PRTG can provide very good detail monitoring without having to customize or add packages or plugins. It can automatically discover and model many types of device and monitor that device in great details without much tinkering.
  • The vendor provides 100 free sensors which make it very easy for you to start using the product without requiring a license and get a very good understanding of the tool before making a purchase decision. The tool allows you to continue to use it for free permanently for the first 100 sensors.
  • If you already have a bigger and more powerful tool, PRTG can be very good as a secondary monitoring tool which some times can help you troubleshoot, validate, and compare with your main tool.
  • Windows Only: PRTG does not support any other platform. Personally, I do not like tools that run on Windows because Windows requires a frequent update, which means downtime. You want your monitoring tool to be as highly available and low maintenance as possible. That and you also require a server license and Windows consume more hardware resource than other platforms. PRTG needs to add support for Linux.
  • Limited ability to do things in bulk. There is no way I know of to mass onboard devices or to mass edit devices. So you will by modifying 1 device at a time. For instance, it would be useful to modify the name or company of 200 devices in one shot.
  • Somewhat weak widgets and dashboard. If you put a lot of effort into it, you can probably come out with a very useful dashboard to keep an eye on key systems/devices. However, some widgets can look nice at first but they are not so useful or easy to understand. Again, it can be done, but a lot of effort is needed to get it right.
  • White interface only. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you have people who use the tool all the time to keep an eye on the system, it can strain your eyes. Need a dark theme.
  • Since the tool is easy to use, it doesn't require a whole lot of effort to train people.
  • Since the license is based on sensor, the more detailed you monitor a device (the more sensor is required), the more it cost you. So makes it less likely that you will monitor as much as possible if a license is limited. If you add everything to monitoring, it can consume a lot of sensors per device.
  • There are many strong alerting/notification features that allowing you to stay informed without a lot of effort to monitor the tool directly.
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.
I have not had any experience with their support so I am not able to give a high or low rating.
PRTG is much better than some tools in its class like ManageEngine Application Manager for example due to it's easy to use interface. Its workflow is also more streamlined and intuitive. It is probably more expensive and I am not a fan of the sensor licensing system. For example, monitoring memory on a server, that consume a sensor. Another sensor for monitoring CPU and etc... and this can make hard estimate cost or have cost certainty. The license should just be based on the number of devices.
If you want to setup a tool to quickly monitor a group of device or do troubleshoot/validate then PRTG is a very suitable tool as you can get setup and going very very quickly.

If you have a smaller environment, PRTG is a very suitable tool as it is easy to use and low cost.

PRTG Feature Ratings

Automated network device discovery
5
Network monitoring
9
Alerts
8
Network capacity planning
4
Customizable reports
6
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
6
Hardware health monitoring
10