Keep an Eye on Things

PRTG Dashboard

Network management systems (NMS) are a key component of any technology infrastructure. They provide real-time monitoring and reporting of a variety of hardware and software components on your network. Over the years I’ve had experience with a number of software packages – Nagios, What’s Up, Zabbix, Zenoss, SolarWinds, and most recently, PRTG.

Some forward-thinking colleagues in other ESUs have been singing the praises of PRTG for a few years, but I wasn’t so quick to jump on the bandwagon. A little over a year ago I had the chance to get in on a group buy with them at a great price, but I still wasn’t sold. I was convinced that I could get what I needed from a free or community supported tool. After floundering in trial implementations with a couple other tools, I finally gave in and bought PRTG.

We’ve only been running PRTG in production for a couple weeks, but I am wholeheartedly convinced that it is worth every penny. In that short time, we have already identified a failed power supply, a degraded RAID array, a bad ROM battery, and other performance tweaks on a number of servers. We also have the most accurate visibility into our bandwidth utilization that we have ever had, which helps greatly when purchasing firewalls, bidding circuits, and buying internet capacity.

One of the things I love most about PRTG is the Maps functionality. It lets you build your own custom dashboards that can show you how things are performing on your network. The image above is a screenshot of the dashboard I have running on a TV in my office all day long. At a glance, I can keep tabs on anything happening in our area. Having this information is invaluable in our line of work.