PRTG Network Monitor Freeware
Paessler AG | PRTG 24.2.96.1375Windows, Windows Server 2022 Base 1809 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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Flexible and fast network monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
It's very quick, easy to learn and use, and supports a wide range of devices. The ability for multi-site, agentless monitoring and reporting is hugely powerful.
What do you dislike about the product?
As an MSP we would prefer more functionality in the API as well as integration with single-sign-on platforms. But these are minor gripes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Real-time network monitoring was a challenge for us, but PRTG gives us the insight across our client base to help quickly identify, diagnose and resolve incidents.
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Excellent System Monitoring Tool
What do you like best about the product?
PRTG makes monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting a snap. When we get complaints of system performance or system unavailable we typically already have notification from PRTG and have started investigating. We no longer have to rely on users to report issues to us. There is an amazing number of sensor types and the development team seems to add new ones on every update. They have added sensors I didn't even know i wanted until they added them.
They also give you the ability to customize each sensor to meet your exact needs, want to monitor a website to be sure it is responding? No problem! Want to take it a step further and make sure the content on the page is correct? It can do that too. Does the site require authentication? You can add that to the sensor as well.
Alerting can do much more than just notifications as well. They give you the ability to execute programs or scripts when an event gets triggered. Do you have a hosted application that occasionally crashes and the service needs to be restarted? Just write a just alert that executes a script to restart the service, no more logging in at 2am just to get the service running again.
Historical reporting is crucial in troubleshooting issues as well. Being able to go back and look at a system's performance overtime has given us the ability to resolve issue and track down resolutions in a fraction of the time it used to take us.
They also give you the ability to customize each sensor to meet your exact needs, want to monitor a website to be sure it is responding? No problem! Want to take it a step further and make sure the content on the page is correct? It can do that too. Does the site require authentication? You can add that to the sensor as well.
Alerting can do much more than just notifications as well. They give you the ability to execute programs or scripts when an event gets triggered. Do you have a hosted application that occasionally crashes and the service needs to be restarted? Just write a just alert that executes a script to restart the service, no more logging in at 2am just to get the service running again.
Historical reporting is crucial in troubleshooting issues as well. Being able to go back and look at a system's performance overtime has given us the ability to resolve issue and track down resolutions in a fraction of the time it used to take us.
What do you dislike about the product?
One of my only complaints with PRTG is the way they count sensors. Unless you go with the full enterprise licensing you will pay for X number of sensors and sometimes you just don't want to waste one on something but you really want the data from it. SNMP switch monitoring eats up a good number of our sensors because each port requires 1 sensor. We really don't want to waste 96 of our 500 sensors monitoring the user switch stack, but the day we need to know where a ton of traffic is coming from makes it worth it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are able to resolve issues before the users even know there is a problem. Most of the time we get calls from users reporting the issue after it is already resolved or just as we are implementing the fix.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Spend some time playing with each sensor type. Don't be afraid to experiment with them. It is amazing what you can do with some of the sensors.
Good balance between UI and functionality.
What do you like best about the product?
Clean, sleek interface
Easy to understand from a user perspective
Good permission functionality, able to provide 'ringed-fence' logins for external users
Tree interface allows settings and permissions to inherit their way down the tree
Flexible notification/threshold functionality
Lots of monitoring options to deploy
Very easy to update, deploy new probes, move and clone sensors
Has a 'Library' function that allows you to restructure existing sensors without duplicating them
Easy to understand from a user perspective
Good permission functionality, able to provide 'ringed-fence' logins for external users
Tree interface allows settings and permissions to inherit their way down the tree
Flexible notification/threshold functionality
Lots of monitoring options to deploy
Very easy to update, deploy new probes, move and clone sensors
Has a 'Library' function that allows you to restructure existing sensors without duplicating them
What do you dislike about the product?
PRTG does not protect itself from its own configuration. If you are creating ping sensors that attempt to ping too often that it can collect the results, it can have repercussions, such as grinding the entire system to a halt. PRTG also has a matrix about how many of certain types of sensors you can create on a probe - however the system doesn't have any kind of tracking for it, so the only real way of telling that the probe is overloaded is that it starts slowing down - and this impacts the data collection. The higher importance of your PRTG installation, you will have to have a keen eyed administrator.
Although PRTG is capable of scaling upwards, once you start to manage thousands of sensors, you need to start rigorously planning your probe deployment. The probe limitations may prevent you from logically grouping your sensor groups at a top level. And you won't notice performance problems until your data collection is already being impacted.
Our internal users use AD authentication. PRTG has a control that if there are too many failed logins in quick succession, then it delays all logins to protect itself from brute forcing. Unfortunately this does more harm than good when someone's password expires and PRTG is still running on a device somewhere (this happens quite often).
You can set a desired availability percentage in your settings, which applies to reports. Unfortunately, it's one setting for your entire environments - we want to monitor different availability levels for different services that we monitor!
Although PRTG is capable of scaling upwards, once you start to manage thousands of sensors, you need to start rigorously planning your probe deployment. The probe limitations may prevent you from logically grouping your sensor groups at a top level. And you won't notice performance problems until your data collection is already being impacted.
Our internal users use AD authentication. PRTG has a control that if there are too many failed logins in quick succession, then it delays all logins to protect itself from brute forcing. Unfortunately this does more harm than good when someone's password expires and PRTG is still running on a device somewhere (this happens quite often).
You can set a desired availability percentage in your settings, which applies to reports. Unfortunately, it's one setting for your entire environments - we want to monitor different availability levels for different services that we monitor!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use PRTG to monitor major backhaul telecommunication links, over 10,000 devices deployed in over 30 points of presence, and a multi-tenanted virtual environment. PRTG provides us event monitoring, alerting to responsible staff and end users, capacity management and uptime reporting. It is a critical piece of infrastructure that allows us to produce metrics for our OLA's and SLA's.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
PRTG is great for pretty much any monitoring scenario for any ICT shop. After exploring the market after installing PRTG, we ended up right back with them.
Casual PRTG User
What do you like best about the product?
Provides up to minute availability of all network devices with alerts for everyone.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is nothing yet that I have come across in PRTG that I do not like.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
PRTG now provides the person on call with a lot more information about what is happening when there is a problem, before driving in. Remote fixes are more likely now.
Reliable, Automated & Affordable .. One of the Best
What do you like best about the product?
Reliable solution I can trust to monitor my machines around the world, easy to add new sensors, save me a lot of bandwidth on each sensor.
It works on likely every machine including mobile phones, The notification system is ready and customizable , APIs and Reports are well done, and the mobile app is helpful to keep my mind in peace.
It works on likely every machine including mobile phones, The notification system is ready and customizable , APIs and Reports are well done, and the mobile app is helpful to keep my mind in peace.
What do you dislike about the product?
I hope they add more sensors to Linux machines and Dynamic DNS option.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
This software is Great and Do the job very well, without breaking the bank .
and the billing options are good for small companies because it bill you by sensor so the company can start right away the get the upgrade when needed.
and the billing options are good for small companies because it bill you by sensor so the company can start right away the get the upgrade when needed.
Great monitor for the price
What do you like best about the product?
Setting up sensors to monitor is incredibly easy. It has great alert and reporting features. It is also easy to implement the monitoring into a webpage for displaying other important information. It is easy to set up, and is very well priced.
What do you dislike about the product?
If you have large amount of sensors, it can be a pain to navigate the pages without just searching for them. It also can be a bit of a pain to pickup setting everything up when first starting out.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Network monitoring (routers/switches), server monitoring (free space, CPU load, ect). It also allows for the use of scripts to monitor, so you can monitor the current amount of calls being placed with Skype for Business.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
This is a great monitor for the price. It can monitor almost anything on your network.
Excellent monitoring tool
What do you like best about the product?
PRTG is a very powerful and dependable monitoring tool. It is our main monitoring solution and we use over 1000 sensors with the product. It is very cost effective for the amount of functionality you get from it and can monitor a vast range of technologies with more and more being added with each update. Just recently Docker monitoring has been added which is fantastic.
They also have a free 100-sensor SKU for homelab use and even small business. I think this is a great offer!
They also have a free 100-sensor SKU for homelab use and even small business. I think this is a great offer!
What do you dislike about the product?
As mentioned in another review, you only get live, 2 day or 30 day historical graphs. For most use cases this is perfectly fine, but it would be nice to see a customization tab that you can put 7 days in to, or even a fortnight. Learning the advanced parts of the tool can be a bit hard, such as root sensors and dependency chains, but once they are set up it makes alerting a lot more reliable.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use PRTG to monitor our server hardware, ethernet networks, Fibre Channel networks, vSphere environment, Windows machines and many more. It proactively helps us monitor our environment - providing we set up sensors properly of course.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If PRTG doesn't have the sensor you need, contact them and they will most likely have it in their roadmap. It is very easy to install however it only runs on Windows. This may be a negative for some people.
Admin of PRTG
What do you like best about the product?
Very easy to setup, you can have this setup and running in less then 10 minutes. Runs on Windows and is all wizard driven. Powerful built in pre-set monitoring probes make monitoring the network, windows and linux easy. It has easy to manage alert thresholds and a map like dashboard. Upgrading is also very easy and can be down in a few minutes. You can do a good bit of customizing to it. The monitoring is agentless and uses SNMP, powershell or the like. Has a desktop agent to alert you when things go down
What do you dislike about the product?
Historical trends only default to Live, 2 days or 30 days. Would like to see 7 days or something. Setting up alert thresholds can be tedious. Web interface can be slow at times. Desktop agent does not auto upgrade with the software on server. Quickly moving between monitors can be a pain as there is no fast switch between looking at a server CPU and that same servers memory usage
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Monitoring and insight
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Great easy to use software. Cannot beat it for the price
Most versatile network monitor
What do you like best about the product?
This software has unlimited ways of customising every singe sensor and scanner. You can present every item in the way to suit you the most. Furthermore you can get the notification based per sensor or group or common item depending on spikes, patterns, unusual traffics and more.
What do you dislike about the product?
Full time job to manage it. Left on auto-discovery will keep adding deleted sensors each time the scan goes and there is no way to block it. Can be tricky in VMWare enviroment where you VMotion often, each time you do you loose historic data as it doesn't "reconnect" to previous storage guid.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Helps detect loops, spikes, broadcasts.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you have lots of storage and want to be able to be notified on anything that's going on on the network.
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