<%NUMBERING1%>.<%NUMBERING2%>.<%NUMBERING3%> PRTG Manual: Key Features

PRTG follows and analyzes your network and requires no third-party software. You can download and install PRTG on premises, or you create a PRTG hosted by Paessler instance. The setup includes a first automatic configuration. Smart Setup, the built-in interactive guidance dialog, leads you through the whole process.

What is PRTG for?

Monitoring with PRTG

Monitoring and alerting you about uptimes and downtimes or slow servers
System health monitoring of your various hardware devices
Network device monitoring and bandwidth accounting
Application monitoring
Monitoring virtual servers
Service level agreement (SLA) monitoring
System usage monitoring (for example, CPU load, free memory, or free disk space)
Database performance and table values monitoring
Email server monitoring and reviewing various backup solutions
Monitoring your network's physical environment
Classifying network traffic by source or destination, as well as content
Discovering unusual, suspicious, or malicious activity with devices or users
Measuring Quality of Service (QoS) and Voice over IP (VoIP) parameters
Cloud monitoring services
Discovering and evaluating network devices
Collecting system information for various hardware types
Finding unexpected relationships between your network components to detect potential security issues and assessing the real usage of your network and hardware
Fail-safe monitoring with a cluster

What is Included in PRTG?

The PRTG on premises installer or a PRTG hosted by Paessler instance contains everything that is necessary to immediately run your monitoring system.

High performance: The database system stores raw monitoring results as well as logs, Toplists, and tickets. This outperforms Structured Query Language (SQL) servers for monitoring data. You can distribute high loads among probes. You can also access the database through the PRTG API.
Minimal system requirements: For PRTG on premises, an average PC that is not older than 2 years is sufficient, and a netbook can also monitor over a thousand sensors. PRTG hosted by Paessler requires no hardware for the PRTG core server.
For more information, see section System Requirements.
High security standards: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for connections and web servers, secure ciphers, a personalized user rights management, and much more.
For more information, see the Knowledge Base: What security features does PRTG include?
An SSL-secured web server with HTTP and HTTPS support for the PRTG web interface, which works as a Single Page Application (SPA) to avoid time-intensive page reloading.
An email relay server for automatic email delivery.
Customizable, personalized alerting:

Various notification methods, for example, email, push, SMS text messages, Syslog messages and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, HTTP requests, event logs, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), executing scripts.
Multiple ways to trigger notifications, for example, status alerts, limit alerts, threshold alerts, multiple condition alerts, escalation alerts.
Gradual dependencies to avoid alarm floods, acknowledging certain alarms to avoid further notifications for this alarm, and alert scheduling.

In-depth report generator to create reports on demand or scheduled reports in HTML, as .pdf file, .csv or .xml data files. Several report templates are available by default.
Graphics engine for user-friendly live graphs and historic data graphs.
Network analysis modules to automatically discover network devices and sensors.
Distributed monitoring to monitor several networks in different locations.
Special features for managed service providers (MSP) to monitor customer networks and increase the quality of service.
Data publishing with real-time dashboards (private and public maps) including live performance and status information. You can design these dashboards with many different objects and you can integrate external objects as well.
Multiple languages such as English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.
Customization: The PRTG API lets you develop your own features. Additionally, you can create custom sensors, notifications, and device templates according to your specific requirements.

PRTG supports monitoring up to several thousand sensors per installation, depending on various parameters. It can optionally work with remote probes to monitor multiple sites or network segments from one central core installation, and to distribute high monitoring loads. You can also configure fail-safe monitoring with a cluster to perform automatic failovers.

PRTG offers two options to monitor your network: PRTG on premises and PRTG hosted by Paessler. With PRTG on premises, the PRTG core server and local probe run within your network. PRTG hosted by Paessler is the PRTG cloud solution, where we at Paessler run the PRTG core server and hosted probe for you. The PRTG web interface for monitoring configuration and reviewing monitoring data is the same for both PRTG hosted by Paessler and PRTG on premises.

Introduction Topics

Detailed System Requirements

Introduction: Monitoring with PRTG