Uptime monitoring with PRTG

PRTG is a proprietary software tool that tracks and analyzes uptime across your network. Available for Windows-based on-premises servers or as a cloud-hosted solution, it continuously monitors hardware and software availability, response times, latency, error rates, and other key performance metrics, so you can prevent bottlenecks and other network issues, and ensure you keep unplanned downtime to a minimum.

The gold standard is 99.999%. A network with 99.999% uptime has around 5.26 minutes of unplanned downtime in a given year. In practice, very few networks achieve that level of uptime consistently, with the most stable networks typically having 99.9% or 99.95% uptime – equal to around four to eight hours of unplanned downtime each year.

Of course, the more closely you monitor your network, the easier it is to achieve a high level of uptime. PRTG is designed to sound the alarm as soon as there are potential issues, so you can fix them before they cause a network outage.

With our free plan, you get:

• A freeware monitoring solution for up to 100 sensors for life
• Monitoring of hardware, software, network performance, data traffic included
• Free alarm, reports, and mapping features

With the freeware edition of PRTG, you can get started with network monitoring in a matter of minutes. Our auto-discovery function detects all the devices within a given IP address range and automatically incorporates them into your monitoring environment.

You can upgrade to a paid subscription license anytime. See pricing

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.