Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for PRTG

The Freeware edition is free for personal and commercial use but is limited to monitoring up to 10 sensors. If you want to monitor more sensors you must purchase one of our commercial editions. The licenses of the commercial editions are based on the overall sensor count. Commercial editions start from 100 sensors up to an unlimited number of sensors.

Licenses of PRTG differ by three parameters:
the maximum number of Sensors, Probes and xFlow/NetFlow Sensors.

* Additional xFlow/NetFlow sensors can be purchased as add-on
** The Enterprise Site License allows multiple installations of the core server within one network.

The licensing options are based on the number of sensors (not on the number of devices or IPs). We define one (1) sensor as any particular, individual monitoring entity. One sensor monitors one network service, one URL, one network connection, one port of a switch, one NetFlow export stream, one CPU load, one disk drive, etc. Please have a look at the list of supported sensor types. Monitoring one item from this list counts as one sensor.

PRTG has rather low hardware requirements compared to similar other products. A standard office PC or server (built 2007 or later) can easily monitor 1.000 sensors and much more (some restrictions apply). Please see "Planning large installations of PRTG Network Monitor" in the knowledgebase.

PRTG is able to create (and/or store) daily/weekly/monthly/annually reports for selected sensors. You can configure the reports to be sent to you via email in PDFs, or have them stored on the hard-drive. Additionally you can run a report interactively in the web browser (in HTML format). You also can have the reports generated on a schedule, e.g. every Monday. There are various templates available which include different sets of data tables and graphs. Please see the "In-Depth Reporting" section in the feature list.

PRTG offers several means of notifications. The most often used means are sending emails or SMS, starting an executable file, sending SYSLog-messages, playing sounds or adding entries to the Windows Event log, among others. Furthermore you can configure notifications on schedule, so that you (or your staff) won't alerted up in the middle of the night for failures of less important servers. You can define numerous conditions for notifications, not only if a sensor is down, also of course if the traffic on a certain interface hits a limit over a certain time, and much more. Please see the "Flexible Alerting" section in the feature list.

There are various account types in PRTG, e.g. "Read-Only" users and "Read/Write"-Users. Furthermore, you can configure the access rights for every group/device/sensor to control which users are allowed to see or edit it. These settings are automatically inherited in the device-tree, so that it is not necessary to edit the access rights of every sensor individually.

There is no simple answer to this question. The approach depends completely on the setup and topology of your network as well as the software and hardware used. Please have a look at the following article: How to set up traffic monitoring with PRTG for various infrastructures.

Yes, you can. PRTG Network Monitor consists of two parts: the core server and the remote probes. The probes monitor the network and send the data to the core server. The core server analyzes the data and publishes it. All PRTG license allows you to set up four probes without extra cost (the Unlimited Site license has no such limitation). More about multiple and remote probes.

Yes, you can keep all configured sensors, notifications, dependencies and everything else. If you want to upgrade from the Freeware or Trial Edition to the Commercial Edition after a purchase, simply download the commercial installer from the Paessler Website and install it on top of your existing installation. If you are not asked for your license key during the setup, please use the "PRTG Server Administrator" afterwards, to enter your registered Name and License key in the tab "License".

PRTG Network Monitor 7 is our strategic core product and our most powerful monitoring solution ever. It has replaced PRTG 6 and IPCheck 5 in June 2008. For legacy projects PRTG 6 is still available, but will not be developed any further. Support for PRTG 6 will be provided until June 2010. Please note that you will receive a download for both products, regardless which one you purchase. One license key will unlock both version 6 and version 7.

For more details please see the PRTG 6 FAQ.

Please see the PRTG Traffic Grapher FAQ.