PRTG - Network Monitoring Software for Your LAN

PRTG from Paessler is an easy to use network monitoring software for your LAN. In fact, it can be used for any network - LAN, WAN, WLAN, and even VPN.

Wow, talking about a great network management software, this one is definitely worth to try.

PRTG network monitoring software available in three different versions, the freeware version (yaayyy ), trial version and the commercial version.
They all different in term of features supported. For me, the freeware version is good enough to monitor my small LAN.

It doesn't need high hardware requirements to run and the great thing about this software is that it provides an easy to use installer.
Just grab the PRTG from www.paessler.com/prtg/download and run the installer.


Fill in and choose some options for the basic configuration and you're ready to monitor your network.

Using the PRTG, you'd hear a lot about Probes, Probe is one or more computers that actually do the network monitoring.
The reason you can have more than one Probe is that if one Probe fail, the other will take over monitoring your network.

PRTG also monitors the Probes' system health in your network, below is the graphical view of the Probe system health:


Next important thing in PRTG are sensors. PRTG freeware edition allows you to have 10 sensors in your network. One sensor monitors one single aspect of a network device. Some exampes (also mentioned in the PRTG manual) including:

• One network service such as SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc.
• Traffic of one port in a network switch
• CPU or memory load
• One NIC traffic load
• One NetFlow Device (NetFlow is network protocol from Cisco used for collecting traffic information)
  
• etc.

Probes, sensors, and other objects in PRTG such as Groups, Devices, and Channels are shown in hierarchical view like this:


Network monitoring software such as PRTG is essential in networks, there are many reasons to use these kind of softwares.
You can monitor your network loads, analyze the traffic, and you get an instant notification if one of your network devices fail.