Know Before It Breaks. Fix Before It Hurts.

PRTG offers a free edition with 100 sensors that never expires—you get full functionality with no time limit and no credit card required. For larger deployments, PRTG uses sensor-based licensing with tiers typically at 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, and 10,000+ sensors. Pricing is a one-time perpetual license fee plus annual maintenance (for updates and support). The cost varies by sensor count: expect approximately $1,750 for 500 sensors up to $15,000+ for 10,000 sensors. Enterprise organizations needing more than 10,000 sensors should consider PRTG Enterprise Monitor with custom pricing. All licenses include unlimited remote probes at no extra cost.

A sensor is PRTG's basic monitoring unit—each sensor monitors one specific metric such as CPU load, memory usage, bandwidth on a network port, or the status of a service. The number of sensors you need depends on how deeply you want to monitor your devices. Rule of thumb: approximately 10 sensors per device on average. For example: a Windows server typically uses 10-15 sensors (CPU, memory, disk, services), a network switch uses 5-50+ sensors depending on port count, and a VMware host might use 20-30 sensors. So an organization with 100 devices would typically need around 1,000 sensors, and 1,000 devices would need approximately 10,000 sensors.

PRTG differentiates itself from open-source alternatives like Nagios and Zabbix in several key ways: Ease of use—PRTG offers a polished GUI with auto-discovery, while Nagios requires significant configuration. All-in-one approach—one tool for network, server, application, and cloud monitoring vs. piecing together multiple solutions. Speed to value—most teams are monitoring within 30 minutes with PRTG. Commercial support—dedicated support team vs. community forums. However, Nagios and Zabbix are free open-source solutions, making them attractive for budget-constrained teams willing to invest time in setup. PRTG competes with commercial tools like SolarWinds, Datadog, and LogicMonitor by offering perpetual licensing (one-time cost vs. subscription) and on-premises deployment for data sovereignty.

Yes, PRTG provides comprehensive cloud monitoring capabilities. For Amazon Web Services (AWS), PRTG offers native sensors for EC2, CloudWatch, S3, ELB, RDS, and billing monitoring. For Microsoft Azure, you can monitor virtual machines, storage accounts, SQL databases, and Azure services via the Azure API and Azure Monitor integration. For Google Cloud Platform, PRTG supports monitoring through REST API sensors and custom scripts. You can also deploy PRTG remote probes inside your cloud environment (as EC2 instances or Azure VMs) to monitor cloud resources from within, reducing latency and providing inside-the-cloud perspective. This hybrid approach lets you monitor both on-premises and multi-cloud infrastructure from a single PRTG console.

PRTG Network Monitor runs on Windows Server 2016, 2019, or 2022 (64-bit). It can also run on Windows 10/11 for testing purposes. Hardware requirements scale with sensor count: for up to 2,500 sensors, you need a minimum of 4 CPU cores and 8GB RAM. For 5,000 sensors, recommend 8 cores and 16GB RAM. For 10,000+ sensors, consider 16+ cores, 32GB+ RAM, and SSD storage. PRTG can be deployed as a virtual machine on VMware, Hyper-V, or Citrix, and in cloud environments like AWS EC2 or Azure VMs. The PRTG core server requires approximately 200KB of disk space per sensor per day for historical data, so plan storage accordingly for long-term data retention.

Yes, PRTG excels at network and bandwidth monitoring. SNMP monitoring supports v1, v2c, and v3 (with encryption) for routers, switches, firewalls, printers, and any SNMP-enabled device. NetFlow/sFlow/jFlow sensors collect detailed traffic data from Cisco, Juniper, and other vendors, showing top talkers, protocols, and bandwidth trends. Packet sniffing sensors analyze traffic headers for deep inspection. PRTG also supports bandwidth monitoring via WMI for Windows, SSH for Linux, and QoS roundtrip sensors for latency and jitter measurement. You can set thresholds to alert when bandwidth usage exceeds limits, helping identify network bottlenecks and bandwidth hogs before they impact users.

Yes, PRTG's remote probe technology enables distributed monitoring across unlimited locations. You install a lightweight remote probe at each branch office, data center, or cloud region, and it connects back to your central PRTG core server via SSL. This allows monitoring behind firewalls without opening inbound ports or requiring VPN tunnels. All data is consolidated in one dashboard for unified visibility. Remote probes can also provide failover—if one probe goes down, others continue monitoring. For very large enterprises, PRTG Enterprise Monitor supports multiple core servers with an ITOps Board to federate data from thousands of probes across global infrastructure.

PRTG offers extensive alerting capabilities to ensure you're notified of issues immediately. Notification methods include: Email with customizable templates, SMS/text messages via gateways, Push notifications to iOS/Android PRTG apps, Slack and Microsoft Teams integration, HTTP webhooks for custom integrations, Syslog forwarding, and SNMP traps. Advanced alerting features include: dependency-aware alerts (avoid alert storms when a parent device fails), scheduled pause windows for maintenance, multi-stage escalation policies, and the ability to trigger custom scripts or execute commands automatically. You can set warning and error thresholds with separate notifications, and use state triggers to alert only after an issue persists for a specified duration.

Yes, PRTG scales to enterprise environments through two approaches. A single PRTG Network Monitor server can handle up to approximately 10,000-20,000 sensors depending on hardware resources and polling intervals. For larger environments, PRTG Enterprise Monitor is designed for unlimited scale—you deploy multiple PRTG core servers and use the ITOps Board to federate data into a unified view. Enterprise Monitor supports: unlimited sensors across unlimited locations, global dashboards aggregating data from all instances, centralized user management, and enterprise-grade features like LDAP/Active Directory integration and role-based access control. Many Fortune 500 companies and global enterprises with 50,000+ devices rely on PRTG for their infrastructure monitoring needs.