PRTG Network Monitor Review

We use it for monitoring items on the network: switches, servers, and other devices, to guarantee or at least monitor uptime.

It has provided us with early warning for potential issues and has stopped potential downtime before it occurs. It also reduces the amount of wasted time that comes with dealing with things after the fact, so scheduled maintenance can be more easily performed.

It provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure by telling us whether things are up, what the current usage is, and whether we need to plan to modify that. It tells us whether there are spikes in usage that either need to be addressed within the application, based on additional resourcing for the application, or at the server level.

The most valuable feature is the alerting when there's downtime. 

Also, the feature whereby it shows when my hard drives are moving towards thresholds that would be considered outages, before they reach that point - that is valuable. That's the main thing we want out of it, a warning.

The Desktop app is fine, it's easy enough to use, it installs relatively easily. It's lightweight, it sits in the corner, and it pops up if there's a real issue. I tend to use the web interface to actually do any of the work within it. But the Desktop app sits there in the background and it works fine.

The sensors are good, there's a large availability, and they provide relevant information. The way those sensors are deployed allows you to modify and tweak them, based on what you want to achieve out of them. But you can equally remove sensors with relative ease if they automatically include things that you don't want to monitor.

I would like to see Office 365 monitoring. Essentially, it doesn't do it. I assumed not at all, but apparently it does it slightly. However, due to issues with APIs, they currently don't provide full monitoring for O365. It is something they're looking into.

I've not seen any outages with it so I'd say it's stable.

It's scaled as far as we've needed it to so far and we're planning to roll it out further. It scales perfectly fine. It's pretty easy to introduce new offices. We've got it on a core set of offices at the moment, but adding additional offices as they've been deployed has been a straightforward, easy process.

I've not had to use the tech support. I do use the online resources and, from that point of view, there seems to be a reasonably extensive knowledge library that answers any questions I've had to address.

We previously used SCOM as a solution and migrated to this because the feature set is quite similar, but it cuts out a lot of the noise and the complexity of the configuration. We started looking for other solutions which would give us something that was easier to configure whilst producing the same amount of information.

The initial setup was fine. It was straightforward enough.

I didn't personally install it so it's difficult for me to say how long it took from the time it was installed until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure, but I assume it was within minutes of it actually being installed. The installation of the sensors is quite quick, so it would have been five minutes or ten minutes after installation.

We had somebody internally who had used the product previously at another company. They were able to install it due to intrinsic knowledge of the product.

It's possible that it has saved us money, but it's difficult to measure because it's a sort of intangible in terms of downtime and the cost of downtime, depending on the system.

We did look at a couple of other solutions, but partly because we had somebody with in-house knowledge of PRTG and ability in it, they essentially gave it reasonably good reviews from their personal usage. So we chose to go with something that was a known factor.

We would have looked at stuff like SolarWinds and some others, but off the top of my head, I can't remember which ones.

It is a good solution, one that is at least worth investigating.

The historical data provided by the solution would potentially help optimize network performance, but it's not something I directly look at so I can't really pass along an opinion on that.

Overall, the feature set looks good. It covers off a lot of what we're interested in.

I would rate PRTG at eight out of ten. It does a lot of the things that I need it to do in terms of monitoring. It provides great feedback and produces it in an easily consumable way. The caveat is that it doesn't quite cover off everything I need it to do at the moment.