Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for PRTG

A: The Freeware Edition is free for personal and commercial use but is limited to monitoring only up to three sensors (SNMP or packet sniffer based only). If you want to monitor more sensors or want to use Netflow based monitoring you must purchase one of the commercial editions. The commercial editions offer the following added features (depending on the edition):

• More devices and more ports/interfaces can be monitored
• Cisco Netflow Collectors can be set up

A:

Since both products can perform similar tasks the following matrix will help you choose the right software for managing your bandwidth:

	PRTG Traffic Grapher	IPCheck Server Monitor
Monitoring of bandwidth and network usage	Specialized	Only basic functionality
Monitoring of failures, uptimes, and downtimes	Only basic functionality	Specialized
Monitoring network parameters using SNMP (e.g. CPU loads, disk usage, temperatures)	Yes	Yes
Analyzing network packets passing through local network cards	Yes	No
Analyzing Cisco Netflow data streams	Yes	No
Classifying bandwidth usage by protocol or IP address	Yes	No
Reasons for notifications	Device failure, overloaded resource, breached threshold	Device failure, downtime, recovery, slow responses
Notification types	Email	Email, popup, sound, ICQ, SMS, pager, HTTP-request, NETSEND, custom scripts
Daily/monthly email reports	Yes	Yes
X% percentile calculation	Yes	No
Runs on	Win98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003	Only on NT, 2000, XP, 2003

A: For network usage and bandwidth monitoring PRTG Traffic Grapher supports three methods to acquire the data:

• It can log the amount of data flowing in and out of SNMP enabled network components using the "Internet MIB-2" standard
• It can inspect all data packets passing a computer's network card ("packet sniffing")
• It can use bandwidth usage data sent by Cisco routers using the Netflow protocol (V5)

A: Yes, using the Packet Sniffer or Netflow based monitoring you can differentiate the traffic by protocol, IP addresses and MAC addresses.

A: Yes, using the Packet Sniffer or Netflow based monitoring you can differentiate the traffic by protocol, IP addresses and MAC addresses. But: If several websites share one common IP address PRTG is not able to classify the bandwidth usage between them.

A: Yes, using the Packet Sniffer or Netflow based monitoring you can differentiate the traffic by protocol, IP addresses and MAC addresses.

A: Yes, using the SNMP monitoring you can monitor the traffic on each single port of your router (or PC, server, etc.)regardless of IP addresses and/or protocols used.

A:

The licenses only differ by the number of supported sensors (25, 100, 500, 1000 and unlimited). Which license you need, depends on how many sensors you want to monitor. If you want to monitor e.g. all ports of a 24 port switch you will need 24 sensors. Please refer to the next FAQ to learn, what counts as a sensor.

A: The licensing options are based on the number of sensors. Each of the following items counts as one sensor:

• SNMP monitoring of traffic/bandwidth on one port of any device (e.g. switch, firewall, server) using the MIB2 standard (incoming and outgoing traffic count as one sensor)
• Monitoring errors/min, unicast packets/s, non-unicast packets/s on one port of a device via SNMP using the MIB2 standard (incoming and outgoing readings count as one sensor)
• Monitoring one other system parameter via SNMP (e.g. CPU, diskspace etc.) that is accessible via one OID value
• Monitoring traffic going through one local network card (NIC) via Packet Sniffing. If you use filtering then each set of filters counts as one sensor.
• Monitoring of one stream of data traffic via Netflow Monitoring. If you use filtering then each filterset counts as one sensor.

The number of actual hardware devices is not taken into account at all, only the number of sensors. For the "unlimited licenses" the number of sensors that can be monitored is not programmatically limited by the software itself, but may be limited by your software, hardware and network. See Planning large installations of PRTG Traffic Grapher.

A: Please see "Planning large installations of PRTG Traffic Grapher" on the Knowledge Base.