Network Monitoring Face-off: PRTG vs LibreNMS

• FAQs about Network Monitoring Systems
• Paessler PRTG and LibreNMS compared

Efficient network monitoring systems (NMS) are indispensable for ensuring seamless operations and preemptive troubleshooting of your IT infrastructure. As businesses increasingly rely on robust networks to sustain their computing activities, the importance of selecting a reliable NMS cannot be overstated. This article delves into a detailed comparison between two contenders in this domain: Paessler PRTG and LibreNMS.

Paessler PRTG is a well-established player known for its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface, while LibreNMS is celebrated for its open-source flexibility and robust community support. Through this comparison, we aim to provide an in-depth understanding of what these tools offer, the unique strengths they bring to the table, and their potential shortcomings.

Our exploration begins with a brief overview of what network monitoring systems are and why they are critical investments for any organization. Following that, we outline the key features to look for when choosing a network monitoring system. Finally, we present a detailed head-to-head analysis of PRTG and LibreNMS, evaluating them across various categories to help you make an informed decision.

Whether you’re a seasoned IT professional or a decision-maker exploring NMS options for the first time, this guide will equip you with the insights needed to optimize your network management strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions About Network Monitoring Systems

What are Network Monitoring Systems?

Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) are specialized tools designed to monitor and manage the entire network infrastructure of an organization. These systems provide a centralized platform for IT administrators and network engineers to oversee and control various network components, including routers, switches, servers, firewalls, and other network-enabled devices.

The primary goal of an NMS is to ensure the network’s optimal performance, availability, and security by continuously monitoring network operations, identifying potential issues, and facilitating swift troubleshooting and resolution. By leveraging NMS tools, businesses can ensure their networks are secure, reliable, and performing at their best, supporting seamless operations.

What Are the Key Features of Network Monitoring Systems?

Network Monitoring Systems are a complex category of software, which comes in all shapes and sizes. Some tools may focus on specific aspects of your network, while others may adopt an “all-in-one” strategy, covering as many aspects possible. But regardless of the approach, they all share some common characteristics.

Real-time Monitoring: NMS tools continuously scan the network for performance metrics such as bandwidth usage, packet loss, latency, and errors. This real-time data collection helps in identifying performance bottlenecks and ensuring the network operates efficiently.

Alerting and Notifications: These systems can be configured to send immediate alerts to network administrators when potential issues or anomalies are detected. Alerts can be usually sent through various channels, including email, SMS, or push notifications, enabling quick response to prevent downtime.

Fault Detection and Diagnosis: NMS tools are adept at detecting network failures or malfunctions, sometimes even before they can become evident through other means. They can often provide diagnostic information or suggest potential solutions, helping administrators to address issues promptly.

Performance Analysis and Reporting: Network Monitoring Systems generate detailed reports on network performance over time. These reports can include metrics on traffic flow, device health, and usage patterns, which are crucial for capacity planning, compliance, and optimizing network resources.

Configuration Management: Some NMS tools offer features for managing device configurations, including backup and restore functionalities, version control, and automated configuration changes. This helps in maintaining consistency across the network and recovering quickly from device failures.

Security Monitoring: Security is a critical aspect of network management. NMS tools often include features to monitor network security, detect unauthorized access, and protect against threats such as malware and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

Why Should You Invest in Network Monitoring?

There are many reasons to invest in network monitoring. Here are five of them, in no particular order.

1. Performance optimization: continuous monitoring can help you pinpoint issues and identify opportunities for optimization that will improve the performance of your network, sometimes without the need for hardware upgrades.

2. Security: monitoring allows you to spot early signs of uncommon behavior or usage patterns indicative of an intrusion attempt or ongoing attack. This will give you time to react and deploy countermeasures before a data breach occurs.

3. Resource allocation: find out where resources are being underutilized or overutilized, allowing you to redistribute them according to real needs to ensure the most effective usage of your systems.

4. Proactive maintenance: monitoring allows you to detect and fix potential issues before they become critical and result in outages that may affect the performance of your applications or even the profitability of your business.

5. Regulatory compliance: businesses that handle sensitive information, like financial or healthcare data, need to meet strict regulatory standards that specify how this information is stored and handled. Monitoring will allow you to prove compliance with these standards and secure approvals that may be crucial to keep your business running.

What to Look for When Choosing Network Monitoring Systems?

When selecting a Network Monitoring System (NMS), it’s crucial to evaluate the system’s capabilities to ensure it meets your organization’s specific needs for managing and monitoring your network infrastructure. Here are the some features to look for:

Comprehensive Coverage and Compatibility: The NMS should offer broad coverage of your network’s components, including routers, switches, servers, virtual machines, and other network-enabled devices across various manufacturers and platforms. Compatibility with a wide range of devices and protocols ensures that you can monitor your entire network infrastructure through a single system, providing a unified view of network health and performance.

Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: Essential for timely detection of issues, real-time monitoring allows you to keep an eye on network performance metrics like bandwidth usage, latency, packet loss, and error rates. The system should also provide configurable alerting mechanisms that notify network administrators via email, SMS, or other means when performance thresholds are exceeded, enabling quick response to potential problems.

Detailed Reporting and Analytics: Look for an NMS that offers in-depth reporting and analytics capabilities. It should be able to generate detailed, and customizable, reports on network performance, utilization, and trends over time. These insights are invaluable for capacity planning, identifying recurring issues, optimizing network performance, and making informed decisions about network upgrades or expansions.

Fault Detection and Troubleshooting Tools: The ability to quickly identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues is critical. A good NMS should include tools for automatic fault detection, root cause analysis, and possibly even suggest corrective actions. This feature helps reduce downtime by enabling faster resolution of network problems.

Scalability and Customization: As your network grows, so will your monitoring needs. The NMS you choose should be scalable, capable of accommodating an increasing number of devices and metrics without significant performance degradation or additional cost. Customization options, such as the ability to define custom metrics, tailor dashboards, and set specific alert conditions, are also important for adapting the system to your organization’s unique requirements.

Free Trials or Demonstrations: Before committing to a network monitoring system, it’s highly beneficial to have hands-on experience with the software. An NMS that offers a free trial or live demonstration allows you to evaluate its features, user interface, and compatibility with your network environment in a real-world setting. This firsthand experience can help you assess whether the system meets your specific requirements, how intuitive and user-friendly the interface is, and how well it integrates with your existing infrastructure.

Free trials also provide an opportunity to test the system’s scalability and performance under your network’s specific conditions. Making an informed decision based on actual usage can significantly reduce the risk of investing in a solution that may not fully address your organization’s needs, ensuring a better return on investment and satisfaction with your choice.

In addition to these core features, consider other factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities with other IT management tools, support and maintenance options provided by the vendor, and, of course, the total cost of ownership. A well-chosen network monitoring system can provide deep visibility into your network’s performance and health, enabling proactive management and optimization of your IT infrastructure.

Battle of the Network Monitoring Systems: Paessler PRTG vs LibreNMS

Overview

Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is an advanced network monitoring solution developed by Paessler AG, designed to provide comprehensive visibility into various aspects of IT infrastructure.

This tool is engineered for Windows-based systems, enabling IT administrators and network engineers to monitor their network’s performance, including LAN, WAN, WLAN, VPN, and various types of servers such as web, mail, and file servers. Additionally, it supports monitoring of Linux systems, Windows clients, routers, and more, making it a versatile solution for managing a wide array of network components.

One of the standout features of PRTG Network Monitor is its sensor-based approach to monitoring. In PRTG terminology, a sensor represents a single data point that is monitored on a device. This could be anything from the CPU load on a server, the traffic on a network interface, to the response time of a website. This granular level of monitoring allows for detailed insights into the performance and health of each component of the IT infrastructure.

The application’s ability to monitor a broad spectrum of network components and parameters, including network devices, bandwidth, servers, applications, virtual environments, remote systems, and IoT devices, makes it a holistic solution for network management.

In turn, LibreNMS is a comprehensive and fully-featured network monitoring system that stands out for its extensive device support and user-friendly nature. It is built on PHP and MySQL, and leverages autodiscovery to automatically add and monitor network devices using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), making it an efficient tool for managing a diverse range of hardware and operating systems.

It offers a broad spectrum of monitoring capabilities, including network devices, servers, power supplies, temperature sensors, access points, and overall data center status. Furthermore, it provides real-time insights into uptime, downtime, device availability, link performance, and various issues that might affect network health.

User Interface

PRTG Network Monitor offers an intuitive user interface and a highly customizable dashboard that provides a real-time overview of network health and performance metrics. This user-friendly approach ensures that even those with minimal technical expertise can effectively use the tool to monitor their network.

Dashboards can be customized to display critical information, such as live traffic data, system health statuses, and performance charts, providing a comprehensive snapshot of the network at a glance. Data from many sensors can be combined into a single dashboard, which makes it easy to monitor all relevant aspects of your network on a “single pane of glass”. Dashboards can be shared internally or be publicly available using a public URL. It is event possible to integrate a shared dashboard inside a webpage using an iframe.

LibreNMS also offers a highly customizable web-based dashboard which, according to the developers, is mobile-friendly. Users can choose between various widgets, each providing different types of information such as alert displays, component status, event logs, device summaries, graphs, system logs, “top” metrics in various categories and more.

Dashboards can be set as private or shared, and shared ones can be read-only or modifiable. It is also possible to design a custom dashboard and set it as a global default for all users. 

It is worth noting that PRTG does have apps for Android and IOS, which comes in handy for those who need to take their monitoring on the go. LibreNMS also claims to have Android and iOS apps on its homepage, but there are no download links and a search on the respective stores came up empty.

Alerting and Reporting

PRTG Network Monitor is not only about monitoring; it also excels in alerting and reporting. The system can be configured to send alerts via email, SMS, or push notifications to ensure that IT staff are promptly informed about potential issues, enabling swift action to prevent downtime or performance degradation.

PRTG’s reporting features are designed to offer users in-depth insights into their network’s performance and health through customizable, automated reports. These reports can be generated on-demand or scheduled and are available in various formats such as HTML, PDF, CSV, and XML, catering to diverse user preferences and requirements.

With a range of preconfigured templates, users can tailor reports to highlight specific data points. The reports can include detailed graphs, data tables, and numeric results covering a broad spectrum of network metrics like availability, performance, network traffic, and CPU and memory usage.

LibreNMS also equips users with robust alerting features, and it allows users to manage alerts in a detailed and organized manner. This includes viewing alert details, acknowledging alerts to prevent repeat notifications, and muting or unmuting alerts based on current needs.

Users can also create custom alert rules tailored to specific monitoring requirements. These rules can be based on a wide range of conditions, such as device status, severity levels, and various performance metrics.

However, the native reporting features in LibreNMS seem to be very limited. Worth of note is the billing module, which can be used to generate bandwidth bills for ports on your network based on usage, data transfer or other billable metrics.

Expandability

As we said before, monitoring on PRTG is based on sensors. The software comes with more than 250 sensors built-in, for monitoring common applications, services and hardware from multiple vendors, and you can mix and match them as needed. If that is not enough, there are sensors that monitor the return values of Python scripts or executables, allowing you to develop truly customized monitoring solutions that seamlessly integrate with the PRTG interface.

The list of “vendors” supported by LibreNMS is quite large: there are more than 800 names on it. However, it does not list which features or products of each vendor are supported. You may find an “Arris Satellite Receiver” on the list, but which aspects of it are supported? Hard to tell.

And the documentation makes no mention of plugins or add-ons, which means that if something you wish to monitor is not supported, there is not much you can do. There is, however, an API (currently at version zero), which means that it is possible to integrate aspects of LibreNMS with your existing solutions.

Pricing

Compared to many other network management systems, PRTG Network Monitor has a fairly straightforward and transparent pricing scheme. It is available through subscription licensing, with prices varying with the amount of “aspects” of your network you wish to monitor. Users usually monitor 10 aspects per device, so it is easy to calculate how many devices you can monitor in a given license tier.

The starting point is PRTG 500, which lets you monitor up to 500 aspects, or around 50 devices, for US$ 2.149. This can grow up to the PRTG XL Tier, which can monitor up to 10,000 aspects (1,000 devices) for US$ 17,899.

For those who need to monitor more than a thousand devices, PRTG recommends the PRTG Enterprise Monitor, which is available on a subscription basis starting at US$ 17,599. And those who would prefer a managed solution can opt for the PRTG Hosted Monitor, recommended for cloud and hybrid IT infrastructures.

Regardless of the licensing mode, to run PRTG Network Monitor you will need a Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows 11, or Windows 10 system running directly on x64-based hardware, or a properly configured virtual environment. 

Pricing for LibreNMS is even simpler than PRTG. It is free and Open Source software, which means that not only you don’t need to pay one cent to use it, but also that the source code is freely available and modifiable. In fact, LibreNMS is itself a “fork”, or derivation, of another Open Source project, called Observium.

Free is better, right? Not quite. You won’t need to pay for the software, but you also won’t get technical support. This might not matter much if you have on your team someone which is already familiar with LibreNMS, but that probably is not the case. And if you run into an edge case, software bug or weird configuration issue, you will be on your own trying to find the solution in a Discord channel or community forums.

To run LibreNMS you will need a server running CentOS 8, Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04. Installation is a quite involved process, to say the least: you will need familiarity with Linux systems and the command line.

Then you will need to follow all the steps described in the documentation. In summary: install a bunch of dependencies, add a user to your system, download the software, manually set the required permissions, set the correct timezone, configure a database (MariaDB), configure PHP-FPM, manually configure your web server, set the correct SELinux permissions, allow LibreNMS connections through the system firewall, enable command completion, configure snmpd, set up a cron job, enable a scheduler and copy a logrotate config file. Whew! Are we done yet?

Not quite, that was just the preparation. Only after all that you can run the web installer for LibreNMS and go through some final steps, like enabling HTTPS, so your connection to the web interface will be secure (it is not by default).

Thankfully, there is a validation script to check all the steps of the installation process and help you if you run into issues. Oh, and after you get the software running, be sure to check the optimization guide, with even more steps, on the official homepage to ensure good performance. 

Conclusion

Considering all aspects discussed above, between LibreNMS and Paessler PRTG, our favorite network monitoring system is Paessler PRTG, as it “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics, and streamlines your workflow by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool.

The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your network, but also your services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs. 

That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues.