PRTG with 100 sensors now free

#Chri5# · 9 Apr 2015 at 08:42

http://www.paessler.com/blog/2015/04/07/all-about-prtg/paessler-offers-prtg-100-for-free

That's why we now give away the 100 sensor license to everybody, for example, small business owners, startups, and private users. And if your business grows you don't have to change your monitoring solution—just upgrade to one of our commercial licenses with more sensors.

That was a 330 euro license :cool:

Obviously there is open source out there but PRTG is an absolute doddle to get going. The Cloud Ping sensor is very handy. You run your own single server install of PRTG but can make use of their cloud setup, so can get ping results from 5 continents.

nutcase · 9 Apr 2015 at 09:01

Cool. It wasn't that long ago they upped the free one from 10 to 30. 100 is actually useful for my little network!

SMN · 9 Apr 2015 at 09:17

Without breaking the T+C's and promoting my company (i work in monitoring), 100 sensors is still not a great amount. On average people monitor between 7-20 sensors/service checks per server/host.

At 100 sensors, thats between 5 and 15 devices you can monitor which isnt a great deal. If you want to really avoid paying any money for monitoring and support, 'advanced' features, etc arent a requirement then check out some of the better open source tools such as Zenoss Core 5 and Zabbix. Icinga is very featureful but its very German, in that its designed with functionality in mind - as opposed to usability.

#Chri5# · 9 Apr 2015 at 12:11

I should mention I've got no association with PRTG other than we use it at work and are very happy with it. We have a license for 1000 sensors.

IMHO, I don't think it's totally aimed at the open source offering. I think it's for SMEs which don't have any monitoring in place with an admin (who might only do the IT as a side-job) who doesn't want to be having to dive into PHP configuration etc. An SME may only have one or two servers to monitor, perhaps some bandwidth stats from a router so 100 sensors is going to be fine.

nutcase · 9 Apr 2015 at 20:17

SMN said:
Without breaking the T+C's and promoting my company (i work in monitoring), 100 sensors is still not a great amount. On average people monitor between 7-20 sensors/service checks per server/host.

At 100 sensors, thats between 5 and 15 devices you can monitor which isnt a great deal. If you want to really avoid paying any money for monitoring and support, 'advanced' features, etc arent a requirement then check out some of the better open source tools such as Zenoss Core 5 and Zabbix. Icinga is very featureful but its very German, in that its designed with functionality in mind - as opposed to usability.

It's a marketing ploy - tease you with 100 sensors as a trail and you soon find you need more so look at spending the money.

I had it with the free 10 sensors, then they upped it to 30 which helped but I was seriously considering the 100. Glad I waited! I only have a few machines so 100 should be plenty for me.

Ev0 · 9 Apr 2015 at 21:28

Might have a play with this as can think of a couple of things I could do with it from a ipfix netflow point of view, might be a little more lightweight than the other software I can use for the job.