Real-Time Network Monitoring with PRTG

PRTG is a proprietary software tool that tracks the health and performance of every component that forms part of your network. Available for on-premises servers or as a cloud-hosted solution, it's capable of monitoring unlimited local, remote, and virtual network devices, bringing critical system data together in one simple, intuitive interface you can access from anywhere: at the office, at home, or on the go.

Monitoring your network in real time is important for several reasons:

• Security: Real-time monitoring enables you to spot and address security threats as they take place. By keeping a constant watch, you can quickly catch suspicious activities such as unauthorized access attempts, malware infections, or potential data breaches.
• Performance: By monitoring network traffic in real time, you can identify performance bottlenecks and issues that may be impacting the speed and reliability of your network. This enables you to proactively address these issues before they escalate and affect user experience.
• Resource utilization: Real-time monitoring helps you track resource utilization such as bandwidth usage, CPU, memory, and disk usage. This information is valuable for capacity planning, ensuring optimal resource allocation, and identifying any resource-intensive processes that may be affecting overall network performance.
• Compliance: Numerous industries enforce regulatory compliance standards that make ongoing monitoring of network activities to uphold data security and privacy mandatory. By actively monitoring your network, you can show that you comply with these regulations and avoid potential fines.
• Troubleshooting: When network issues occur, real-time monitoring provides valuable insights into the root cause of the problem, allowing you to quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact users or business operations.

It depends. And, no, we're not trying to dodge the question:

• SNMP is the most widely-used method, because it's super-easy to configure, gives you an overview of the traffic across your whole network, and can also monitor individual ports.
• Packet sniffing is great if you want to filter network traffic. For example, you want to see traffic by IP address, port, or protocol.
• Flow technologies also have extensive filtering options but are gentler on your CPU load.
• SSH is a great technology for monitoring your Linux network.
• And WMI is ideal for monitoring Windows servers and workstations.

Yes! The central PRTG server can only be installed on a Windows server. But, once you've installed the PRTG server, you can use the brand-new multi-platform probe that also runs on Linux. With this probe, you can monitor and manage your complete IT infrastructure from your Linux system.

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.