It’s a long-accepted truth, albeit one that’s not entirely comfortable, that most organizations don’t notice their IT provision until it goes wrong.

A network problem often constitutes a business problem, but a smoothly running software & hardware stack merits not a second thought. That’s the situation that keeps sysadmins, cybersecurity specialists and IT professionals on their toes: keeping the truck rolling forward requires constant work, with continuous success very rarely recognized.

Network monitoring, therefore, represents the first place that potential problems show themselves.

Naturally, every systems administrator has their preferred toolkit of apps, utilities, scripts, and preferred tricks to ensure that everything is firing on all cylinders. But in today’s business environment, where a new service may be deployed at little or no notice (such is the nature of SaaS, for example), that keeping on top of the entire network presents tough challenges.

What’s needed is an entirely vendor-agnostic monitoring system that works the way the highly specialized IT professional requires.

And that’s precisely what PRTG from Paessler brings; used by over 200,000 admins across the globe every day, the platform enables IT departments to avoid outages that cost the enterprise money, and proactively respond to early signs of bottlenecks or hindered performance – before they become apparent to the rest of the enterprise and its customers.

Paessler PRTG

The PRTG platform works via a system of “sensors” that can be deployed where required, at will: anywhere in the LAN, WAN, server real estate, websites, apps, databases, services, network hardware, public cloud, and much, much more.

The complete list of monitoring and diagnostics covered makes for a very long read; in short, from a simple ping to full oversight into every aspect of a cutting-edge, containerized production service, PRTG ensures that the enterprise’s systems keep running smoothly.

As new systems move from development, testing, and roll-out into production, sensors can be allocated to different parts of the service. The platform’s powerful API can integrate with existing tools, and/or you can build your own dashboards, available on the web or via mobile apps. Alert scripts can be tweaked or created depending on where and how sensors are deployed, with tiered price plans based on the total numbers of sensor nodes deployed– you decide where and for how long.

As a network grows and evolves, and new services come online, and older versions retire, organizations can ensure that the entire network performs at its optimum – that translates into significant business benefits. Complex data flows can be deployed to monitor user traffic volumes to each server, to ensure every customer gets the optimum experience possible.

As infrastructure changes and becomes more complex, IT departments know that the unforeseen effects of a new app or resource deployment are the ones that will cause the most problems, so getting to the root cause is paramount. PRTG’s intelligent sensors will ensure that any issues are headed off before there’s an impact on the business and allows it to see where resources can be better allocated.

New procurement exercises will be better informed, and IT spending will, therefore, be a better representative of actual need, rather than figures based on guesswork.

PRTG is available as a service from the cloud or can be deployed in-house. There is a free, 30-day unlimited trial so any IT department, large or small, can see just how incisive the platform can be, in everyday running. Carrier-grade data centers, highly-virtualized environments or simple, yet multiple LANs: PRTG serves them all.

Start your free trial today, or speak to a representative about the pricing options that are open to an organization of your scale.