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."
"It gives me a live view of the traffic on the WAN."
"I found PRTG Network Monitor very useful for troubleshooting and monitoring the utilization of either the network or server."
"The most valuable feature of PRTG Network Monitor is the different monitoring probes available."
"Speed of deployment is one of the most valuable features."
"One of its valuable features is the fact that it handles multiple operating systems... And I like the fact that it tells me when things are about to fall over, which means I can preempt it and not have to wake up at three in the morning to fix it."
"We can see which fiber links have been used heavily and, if they are used heavily, we can introduce more links to particular buildings or particular areas."
"It has made our infrastructure more reliable."
"It is user-friendly. It is easy to set up health checks within PRTG and use scans. It is like a self-service tool, and anyone can configure their own settings within PRTG."
"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."
"I can save the traffic and analysis when I want to. Also, it's especially helpful to follow the stream (TCP, UDP, etc.)."
"The filter option provided by Wireshark is its most valuable feature...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The session-level filtering features are valuable."
"The GUI is easy to use."
"It has good basic features."
"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."
"If you're dealing with troubleshooting network, voice issues, or network operations, having a tool like Wireshark to dive into packet details is important. The initial setup is straightforward. Anyone starting out or looking to deploy it on your personal PC or machine can do it easily."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"PRTG Network Monitor could improve by having a feature to allow uploading of preset standard network switch configurations and the ability to monitor the SLA configuration, such as uptime for the switches or internet connectivity. This would be very useful."
"It probably has this already, but if it had a mobile app that would be helpful. For example, on a day like today when I'm out, if I could just fire it up and see green, green, green, green, green or red, that would be good."
"Technical support is an area with concerns in PRTG Network Monitor, where improvements are required."
"The solution has to evolve as an end-to-end monitoring solution. It has to do better at understanding the application at the deepest level."
"Its price can be better. Its price is a problem for us because it is in dollars, and there is a high conversion rate. In terms of new features, it can have BGP monitoring. It should also have a dashboard and maps editor."
"The automation should be improved."
"PRTG access works best from the web GUI. There are dedicated apps on Windows/Android/iOS, but they are slow and don’t work as well as the web GUI."
"Sometimes, it is difficult to drill down further to get information, e.g., if we saw spike in traffic, then we would want to drill down and find out what is causing that spike in traffic."
"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
"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."
"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."
"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."
"Its user interface was a little less friendly. They can make its user interface a little bit more friendly. It is for technical people, and most of the technical people would be able to figure it out, but it would be good to improve its user interface. They can maybe build artificial intelligence into it. Currently, it takes a lot of manpower to analyze and dissect all the data."
"Wireshark could be improved with a delay option when getting data automatically."
"We would like the product to be developed so that it doesn't rely on internet access for installation. We would like to see all of the components required to be integrated into the installer."
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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