Aggregated statistics (availability, bandwidth/traffic, CPU-load, alerting) provide the quickest possible overview of the current status of a complete network. These stati are available for all sensors as well as "per group," enabling the administrator to dig into the data from a birds-eye view of the network down to each individual device.
Classify Bandwidth Usage by IP, Protocol or Connection If you need to know what applications or IP addresses are causing the traffic in your network you can use packet sniffing (PRTG looks at every single data packet travelling through your network for accounting purposes) or NetFlow based monitoring. For both technologies PRTG can analyze the bandwidth usage and break it down to the network protocols or computers in your network.
Under PRTG Network Monitor, the monitoring is performed by "sensors". Sensors are managed using a tree-like hierarchy to create an easy to navigate list, providing the user with the possibility to arrange sensors in groups that monitor similar devices, locations or services. Users can create nested “groups”, each group containing a number of “devices”, each device containing a number of “sensors”.
This list of 42 devices with 241 sensors was automatically created by PRTG during an auto-discovery scan in our test network. During this process the software scans a network segment or IP address range using PING, WMI, SNMP and other protocols. As soon as a device is discovered the device type is analyzed in order to select the most suited device template. More than 20 device templates with pre-configured sets of sensors are included.
The "Top 10 Lists" are a great tool to get a quick overview of all the systems in your network and to find potential resource problems. Top 10 lists are available for:
PRTG Network Monitor has been designed to work for networks of any size. It can be implemented in small networks with just a few devices (e.g. the Freeware edition is capable of monitoring 10 sensors for free) or you can integrate it in large networks using 10,000 sensors or more (currently up to 30,000 sensors are possible).