We performed a comparison between PRTG Network Monitor and Wireshark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"What I've found most valuable is the custom sensor, which allows you to write scripts or code to monitor a specific metric in your environment."
"It's very easy to manage when you've got time to do some work on it: things like adding devices, adding groups, adding sensor clusters, and being able to clone and move stuff around."
"The most valuable feature of PRTG Network Monitor is the different monitoring probes available."
"It is a user-friendly solution."
"Its initial setup process is fast and easy."
"I can create my own program sensor. This means I can add extra monitoring capabilities into the already fundamentally strong foundation."
"The most valuable aspect is the diverse range of features it offers."
"We have asked questions of their technical support and they have a very good response time."
"Packet-capture files can be hard to use due to their size. Wireshark has a tool called tshark that can parse the files with out opening them so that you can take large captures, say 2-10GB, and return only relevant information."
"The drill-down available for packet analysis is great. It gives a network security engineer insight into what is going on at the packet level and enables better troubleshooting."
"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."
"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."
"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."
"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."
"The initial setup is simple."
"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"We're using more cloud services now. It would be useful to be able to get information back from these cloud services in detail, and display any issues within PRTG for the rest of our systems."
"Can be slow in the way it polls the different engines."
"When it comes to third-party integration, one of the things we were looking at was putting some sensors onto our firewall, for instance. If there were a little bit more documentation and some step-by-step guides around that, that would be useful for us."
"With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied."
"I have an issue with DFS, distributed file services... there isn't one by default. Taking into account the difference between DFS and DFSR as well would be great."
"Their penetration within the market could be much better. If their pricing was lower, even though it's reasonable now, it might help them achieve this."
"In terms of sensors and probes, it would be really cool if PRTG had a purely Azure-based solution. We had to install a probe on one of our cloud servers and then let that probe out from there. It would be really cool if it just monitored Azure without having to install something on the device."
"PRTG Network Monitor can improve Layer 2 and Layer 3 network maps and the GUI more user-friendly. Additionally, they should bundle the features so I can monitor everything on one particular device."
"The product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"Wireshark could be improved with a delay option when getting data automatically."
"Wireshark is similar to an OS defense tool, meaning that it runs on an OS such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with Windows or if it's a straightforward process to run it on Windows. Right now, my team needs to run Wireshark from a dongle to use it, so it's an OS-dependable tool, and that's an area for improvement. I was unable to use Wireshark on Windows, and I couldn't capture it, as I'm unsure how to configure the wireless card into monitoring mode on Windows. The process was straightforward on Linux, but it wasn't the case on Windows OS. It seems Wireshark isn't compatible with all OS. For example, you can analyze the log, and you can analyze it on the Windows server, but you can't do a capture in Windows. Configuring Wireshark for Windows isn't as easy as configuring it for Linux."
"This product needs to improve the UI."
"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search. If there were a way to provide a description about what a search - and the similar ones which are available - can do, while a person is typing it, it would make the product easier to use and simultaneously decrease the learning curve."
"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."
"The only thing that I don't like is sometimes there is an update, and something that I was using is either no longer there or it has changed."
PRTG Network Monitor is ranked 5th in Network Monitoring Software with 96 reviews while Wireshark is ranked 3rd in Network Troubleshooting with 61 reviews. PRTG Network Monitor is rated 8.2, while Wireshark is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of PRTG Network Monitor writes "It's an all-in-one solution, and net flow is included in the licensing ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wireshark writes "User-friendly with an easy setup and a nice interface". PRTG Network Monitor is most compared with Zabbix, Centreon, Nagios XI, SolarWinds NPM and ManageEngine OpManager, whereas Wireshark is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, SolarWinds NPM, ClearSight Analyzer and SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.
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