Paessler PRTG Network Monitor 12.3 review

There are plenty of network monitoring tools on the market today but Paessler's PRTG comes out top when in terms of value and simplicity. Many competing products are complex and use a modular approach which can leave you with a mounting bill for optional extras.

PRTG takes a simpler approach as it's licensed purely on the number of active sensors. The count is based on monitored entities and not systems or devices so they will get used up quickly but you can delete any sensors you don't need or purchase an upgrade.

Paessler provides over 130 types of sensors ranging from simple Ping, SNMP and WMI monitors to others for database, mail, file, web and FTP servers. There's more than a nod to the cloud as Paessler has rewritten its Amazon CloudWatch sensors to cover all apps available in Amazon's AWS Cloud.

A new sensor is provided for linking up with Google Analytics so you can see all activity on your web sites. The VMware sensors now provide more information about host systems and you have other sensors for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer systems.

PRTG isn't demanding so for smaller sites the host system can be running anything from Windows XP upwards. We used a Fujitsu Esprimo AMD Athlon desktop PC running Windows 7 and had the software loaded in under two minutes.

Larger sites can use PRTG's fault tolerant clustering feature which supports up to five members where one is designated the master node and the rest as failover systems. All cluster members monitor the network so failover is almost instantaneous and the base price includes a license for a master and one failover node.

PRTG's home page has quick links to the Guru and network views plus options to download the standard Enterprise console and a smartphone app