Item: PRTG Network Monitor
Rating: 8
Author: Eric Engardio

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PRTG Network Monitor as a central monitoring platform for our 4 corporate sites (including Amazon AWS) as well as all of our customer locations (around 10 sites) that are spread across the USA. It's our primary monitoring tool for our entire organization. It does SNMP monitoring well and it makes remote support (an essential part of our business model) of all of our sites possible will alerts that get sent to whoever needs to be notified when something happens.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

PRTG as an SNMP tool makes it possible for us to support all of our environments remotely and that is invaluable.
It was great until we had to deploy a second server to support more than 10,000 sensors (the license itself costs way more than it should have compared to competitors).
Some extra cost is added when you consider the amount of time I've had to spend with device manufacturers getting certain OID's and MIB's since PRTG didn't have them in its repository.

Support Rating

PRTG, while limited in set-up functionality, does its job well. There is a definite learning curve to learn all of its quirks and some design choices could be improved but overall it's a solid monitoring platform. Once it's set up it's very "set it and forget it" which is really what you want from a monitoring tool.

Key Insights

Do you think PRTG Network Monitor delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with PRTG Network Monitor's feature set?

Yes

Did PRTG Network Monitor live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of PRTG Network Monitor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PRTG Network Monitor again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server, Ubiquiti Networks UniFi

Likelihood to Recommend

Our organization is quickly outgrowing PRTG as an SNMP network monitoring tool. We have around 20 total sites we monitor and we're pushing over 16,000 sensors. For a small organization, it's really great and affordable. Once you grow beyond the 10,000 sensor mark, however, it starts to get very pricey and not very efficient.

The perfect tool for the little guy

Overall Satisfaction with PRTG Network Monitor