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."
"I really love the activity library. It gives the flexibility to discover data and metrics about my interface and data server."
"Stable solution for monitoring networks and bandwidth, with multiple functions and features such as NetFlow Collector, graphical monitoring, etc."
"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 solution is easy to manage and the reports are very accurate."
"It gives me a live view of the traffic on the WAN."
"The solution provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It gives us really good quality of service when it comes to monitoring of available space and available resources. It allows us to preempt issues before they become a problem for the business."
"There was only one feature I liked about PRTG Network Monitor a lot, and that was bandwidth monitoring, though, in the newer versions of the tool, that feature is now a bit lacking. Pricing for PRTG Network Monitor is also not as expensive. It's a good tool, even for beginners."
"The email notifications are helpful, and the dashboards are user-friendly for people with little network monitoring knowledge."
"The GUI is easy to use."
"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."
"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."
"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers."
"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."
"I like the filtering feature as we can filter data easily. This feature is also available in tcpdump, but it's a simple piece of software. Wireshark is more advanced and has many features. It allows you to filter a lot of things. The output can be filtered easily. The most important feature is colorization. If I say, "Okay, this particular SMB protocol in red, it will show me red." It's easy to identify that protocol or capture data."
"The best part about Wireshark, in my opinion, is its ability to analyze packet capture files."
"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 Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Improvements in data storage flexibility, such as allowing customers to specify data retention periods, would enhance PRTG."
"The licensing policy needs more flexibility."
"We need something that is more predictive. We would prefer if it wasn't a solution that was corrective and instead offered predictive insights so that we can handle problems before they even occur."
"When using PRTG Network Monitor it is beneficial if you have prior experience with it, the user interface could improve."
"This solution is a good product so far, but I haven't been using it long enough to know how it could be improved."
"If PRTG could help me see the bandwidth for each host I have on my network, either for a wireless or a wired network, that would be very helpful."
"I would like to see them take their graphing tools and convert them into a collector so that we can point telemetry to them"
"PRTG's documentation could be improved."
"This product needs to improve the UI."
"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."
"Whenever we select one of the packets, in terms of the number of bytes, for example, there are three planes, and in the detailed plane, I have to count the number of bytes manually."
"Wireshark gets stuck when it is a larger file."
"The average person would probably find Wireshark hard to use. When I first installed it, I was overwhelmed by all the data it was shooting out. It doesn't make sense until you start doing some research and figure out what everything means. It isn't the most user-friendly tool. It just provides so much information."
"DNS could be improved."
"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."
"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."
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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