How-to: Free network monitoring with PRTG
How to use 100 sensors to keep an eye on critical network devices in your IT – at no cost
- 100 sensors for free for life, all monitoring functionalities included
- Sufficient for a small company network, large home network, or open-source network
- Check hardware, applications, network traffic, bandwidth, and more
PRTG free network monitoring how-to: What you’ll find on this page
PRTG makes free network monitoring as easy as it gets
Custom alerts and data visualization let you quickly identify and prevent all kinds of network issues.
100 sensors for free for life – promise
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is a professional, easily scalable network monitoring tool for monitoring and troubleshooting your entire enterprise network, no matter if it runs on Windows or Linux operating systems, on-premises or in the cloud.
From hardware and virtualized environments to network traffic, bandwidth usage, and applications, PRTG monitors availability, performance, uptime and downtime, or hardware health metrics such as CPU usage.
The free edition of PRTG includes:
- 100 sensors, or measuring points, to monitor your network
- All monitoring functionalities included, also network traffic analysis
- Real-time alerts and notifications via SMS, email, and other methods
- Custom maps and dashboards to visualize your network the way you need
- Customizable reporting based on templates, on-demand or scheduled
- Unlimited number of remote probes for distributed monitoring
What free network infrastructure monitoring looks like in PRTG
Diagnose network issues by continuously tracking the availability, health, and performance of your entire network. Show hardware health and status, application performance, network traffic, response time, bandwidth usage, and other key metrics in real time. Visualize monitoring data in clear graphs and dashboards to identify problems more easily. Gain the overview you need to troubleshoot all kinds of network issues.
Start using free tools for monitoring your network with PRTG and see how it can make your network more reliable and your job easier.
6 use cases for the PRTG free network monitoring software
Syslog & Trap analyzer
Use PRTG, for example, to receive and analyze syslogs or SNMP trap messages, and let PRTG do the alerting for you based on the content of these messages.
A single Syslog Receiver or SNMP Trap Receiver sensor can theoretically be used to monitor an entire network: Under lab conditions (one single sensor without filters), PRTG can handle 10,000 messages per second, so the software offers more than enough power reserves.
Website monitoring
With 100 sensors, the free version offers enough options for comprehensive website performance monitoring, web server monitoring, or to keep an eye on backup processes.
Use, for example, the HTTP v2 sensor to monitor general availability, the HTTP Full Web Page sensor to measure page load time, or set up a HTTP Transaction sensor to monitor processes like logins or filling out and sending forms. The Cloud HTTP v2 sensor lets you even check website availability and load times worldwide.
Email monitoring
As you might have experienced already, disturbances in email traffic can be quite annoying – and even become business critical. PRTG’s continuous email monitoring alerts you before interruptions occur.
Ensure that sending and receiving emails works well with the preconfigured SMTP & IMAP/POP3 email round trip sensors. Or set up dedicated Microsoft Exchange sensors, for example, to monitor backup jobs, mail queues, mailbox size, email integrity, and other important parameters.
Database monitoring
Databases will be another critical aspect of your network, as the performance of many processes is directly dependent on the performance of the underlying database.
PRTG offers preconfigured SQL sensors (MySQL, Microsoft SQL, ADO SQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle SQL) for in-depth SQL database monitoring. You can set up the sensors to monitor standard parameters or custom SQL queries, so you can easily tailor your monitoring to fit individual requirements.
Printer monitoring
Printers might not be as integral to you as email or websites, but broken printers, empty toners, or print jams will surely annoy end-users. You will need two sensors per printer: one that monitors the toner levels, print queues etc., and one that checks statistics like the number of printed pages.
With PRTG’s network mapping feature – which involves easy-to-create HTML pages – you can display your printers on a floor plan of the office, so you know immediately where the printer needing maintenance is located.
Traffic analysis
Functions that are usually available only for purchase as add-ons or modules in other monitoring solutions like SolarWinds or ManageEngine, and even in open source tools like Nagios, are included with PRTG.
Maintain a quick overview of top talkers in your network by monitoring and analyzing the traffic on your routers, switches, and firewalls via the flow protocol. PRTG supports NetFlow for Cisco devices, sFlow, jFlow, and IPFIX. And if you don’t want to use flow, no worries: the preconfigured SNMP Traffic v2 sensor has got you covered.
Your free network performance monitor at a glance – even on the go
Set up PRTG in minutes and use it on almost any mobile device.
Find the root cause of the problem with our PRTG free network monitoring solution
Real-time notifications mean faster troubleshooting so that you can act before more serious issues occur.
PRTG is compatible with all major vendors, products, and systems
Explore our preconfigured PRTG sensors for free network management
PRTG comes with more than 250 native sensor types for monitoring your entire on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud environment out of the box. Check out some examples below!
Create innovative solutions with Paessler’s partners
Partnering with innovative vendors, Paessler unleashes synergies to create
new and additional benefits for joined customers.
“Excellent tool for detailed monitoring. Alarms and notifications work greatly. Equipment addition is straight forward and server initial setup is very easy. ...feel safe to purchase it if you intend to monitor a large networking landscape.”
Infrastructure and Operations Engineer in the Communications Industry, firm size 10B - 30B USD
PRTG makes free network monitoring as easy as it gets
Custom alerts and data visualization let you quickly identify and prevent all kinds of network issues.
PRTG: The multi-tool for sysadmins
Adapt PRTG individually and dynamically to your needs and rely on a strong API:- HTTP API: Access monitoring data and manipulate monitoring objects via HTTP requests
- Custom sensors: Create your own PRTG sensors for customized monitoring
- Custom notifications: Create your own notifications and send action triggers to external systems
- REST Custom sensor: Monitor almost everything that provides data in XML or JSON format
We asked: would you recommend PRTG?
Over 95% of our customers say yes!
Paessler conducted trials in over 600 IT departments worldwide to tune its network monitoring software closer to the needs of sysadmins.
The result of the survey: over 95% of the participants would recommend PRTG – or already have.
Still not convinced?
More than 500,000
sysadmins love PRTG
Paessler PRTG is used by companies of all sizes. Sysadmins love PRTG because it makes their job a whole lot easier.
Monitor your entire IT infrastructure
Bandwidth, servers, virtual environments, websites, VoIP services – PRTG keeps an eye on your entire network.
Try Paessler PRTG
for free
Everyone has different monitoring needs. That’s why we let you try PRTG for free.
Start using free tools for monitoring your network with PRTG and see how it can make your network more reliable and your job easier.
PRTG |
Network Monitoring Software - Version 25.1.102.1373 (January 9th, 2025) |
Hosting |
Download for Windows and cloud-based version PRTG Hosted Monitor available |
Languages |
English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese |
Pricing |
Up to 100 sensors for free (Price List) |
Unified Monitoring |
Network devices, bandwidth, servers, applications, virtual environments, remote systems, IoT, and more |
Supported Vendors & Applications |
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