Monitor your entire IT infrastructure with Paessler PRTG monitoring tools

Paessler PRTG is an IT monitoring software that helps businesses monitor their entire IT infrastructure – no matter if it is an on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environment. 

With PRTG, system administrators can keep an eye on the health and performance of their network devices, traffic, applications, services, and much more, to make sure that their IT and business processes run smoothly at all times.  

If there is an issue in the IT infrastructure, PRTG alerts the responsible person or team immediately via customizable notifications so that they can react quickly before a failure causes more severe problems.

The freeware edition of PRTG always includes up to 100 monitoring aspects – or PRTG sensors – which can be distributed over your network devices as needed.  

Commercial editions of PRTG differ in license scope and pricing depending on the PRTG product you choose. For PRTG Network Monitor, there are annual subscriptions from 500 up to 10,000 sensors. With PRTG Hosted Monitor, you can choose from flexible monthly, annual, and multi-year subscription plans for more scalability. PRTG Enterprise Monitor offers annual subscription licenses for an unlimited number of servers, based on the number of sensors in use.

Both freeware and commercial editions of PRTG include all monitoring features.

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive. 

On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port. 

What is a monitoring aspect? 

“Monitoring aspect” is a more descriptive term for “sensor”. 

PRTG is an all-in-one monitoring solution, which means that no matter which product or license size you choose, you're able to set up comprehensive monitoring for your entire IT infrastructure. With PRTG, you get the full package:

Supports the most important monitoring technologies and protocols

• Includes preconfigured PRTG sensors and device templates
• Is easy to install and set up
• Has great usability
• Comes with different user interfaces for web, desktop, and mobile devices
• Offers customizable maps and dashboards
• Provides custom reports that are easy to publish and share
• Offers customizable alerts and notifications
• Includes basic IT automation tasks
• Can be set up for remote monitoring of multiple distributed locations
• And more

IT monitoring is the process of monitoring an IT infrastructure such as a LAN, WAN, or any other computer system – no matter if it is an on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid infrastructure. The purpose of IT monitoring is to ensure that all components in a network run smoothly and to be able to quickly troubleshoot issues if they occur. 

To keep an eye on the entire IT environment, there are specialized IT monitoring tools that constantly collect, log, and analyze data about the health, availability, and performance of all hardware and software in the respective network. This includes, for example: 

• Devices like printers, switches, routers, or firewalls 
• Physical servers like web, mail, or storage servers 
• Virtual environments 
• Databases 
• Operating systems 
• Applications 
• Services 
• Processes 
• User activities 
• And more 

In modern business environments, there are practically no work modes, tasks, or processes anymore that do not rely on any kind of IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is all the more important that a company’s IT infrastructure runs flawlessly and that issues are detected and resolved as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is via IT monitoring, which has several benefits:  

• Full transparency about what’s going on in the network 
• Quicker identification and analysis of the root causes of issues 
• Faster troubleshooting 
• Outages can be prevented before they actually happen 
• More security because of insights into suspicious activities 
• Increased productivity and efficiency of employees 
• More customer satisfaction and conversions 
• Data-based capacity planning for hardware and software 
• Corporate compliance, for example with SLAs, is ensured 
• Energy and other resources can be saved