PRTG Network Monitor

First of all: Actually (April 2016) the product is free for up to 100 Sensors!

I was searching for an easy solution to monitor the internetconnection of one of my customers from outside. They sporadically experienced strange bandwidth problems and the cable provider didn't solve the problem within months. So while searching for an easy to install and use monitoring (simple ping) solution I found PRTG from Paessler in Nuremberg. I 've heard of it before as the Windows based alternative to Nagios.

What can I say: I expected a solid Dice Game and ended up in Las Vegas!

Installed withing minutes on a small Celeron machine running Windows 7. This runs the core Server and the Probe. You create Groups within the Windows (or Browserbased) Desktop. Within those Groups you create Devices and Sensors (Ping, HTTP, FTP, NTP, SIP, SMTP, SNMP Switch Traffic, ... and I'd say hundreds of others) at Locations you can define and are shown on a map. A configurable HTTPS allows secure Browser and mobile APP access. I use the one for my Windows phone that shows me my favorite (customer) Sensors directly.

Automatically scan your Network (that might create a lot of Devices and Sensors, especially when you are using SNMP ready Switches, but don't worry, just pause them before you run out of your licenses). Monitor Switch Traffic if you wonder how long the Windows 10 updates disturb your other Machines. You can install remote Probes in other networks to monitor them and still collect all data on one central monitoring server.

PS: In the end, the cable provider changed the modem after I sent them several times very clear screenshots from PRTG where you could see the 1800 ms echos all three weeks instead of 32 ms the rest of the time.

Over the years we have experienced failures in our network which have allowed us to learn details that we could correct over time, usually our technical support function was corrective, that is, when a failure occurred our team worked and corrected the anomaly presented, with PRTG we could proactively turn the work into preventive, with the possibility of preconfiguring thresholds on nodes and other specific equipment we could detect failures such as traffic jams, loops and even in some BRAS servers failures such as lack of IPv4 addresses; All this allowed us to improve the network's operability, reducing downtime.

I have been a longtime customer of PRTG 7+ yrs now. I contact them about once a year for little things I run into with the program. This time around they refuse to help, beyond basic email support in the middle of the night. If you want a program that provides support this isn't the product for you. If you are in the US the best you get is email support and they usually only respond while you are sleeping. Don't expect them to go out of the way for you. PRTG has wasted 2+ hrs fighting with me on fixing something their software caused, something they could likely fix in a 5min phone call. After paying them for support all this time I am done with this company, they are a scam!

PRTG is a powerful tool that greatly helps any IT team, by relying on protocols such as snmp and netflow among others, it allows to acquire very accurate traffic information in the different equipment with which it communicates, this gives an image of the current status of the equipment or service analyzed, thus ensuring immediate response to any eventuality occurred which sometimes represents losses of money for the organization.