How-to: Free network monitoring with PRTG

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

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.

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!