SevOne versus Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor

Two of the best tools that make network monitoring hassle free are IBM’s SevOne and Passler PRTG Hosted Monitor. So how do the two compare and which one is the better option for you? Let’s find out with this side-by-side comparison.

How we decide on the winner

Before we go ahead and pick a winner, we first need to understand the most important factors that we’ll use to compare the two tools.

1. Network monitoring capabilities: The most important factor that we need to take into account is how efficient both SevOne and PRTG Hosted Monitor are at networking monitoring. We’ll compare key metrics, including scalability, reporting, and integration to understand which one is better.
2. Ease of use & setup: The next thing we need to judge is the user interface of both tools and how intuitive and easy they are to learn and use. Similarly, we need to see how you can customize and set up the software according to your needs.
3. Cost: Finally, we need to take a look at the pricing plans and determine whether you get value for your money and if the tool falls within your company’s budget.
4. Conclusion: where we draw our winner for this comparison

Overview of SevOne

IBM SevOne is a comprehensive and scalable app-centric network performance monitor for NetOps. This agentless tool leverages analytics powered by machine learning to help identify and prevent issues with network performance before they escalate. It proactively monitors the user’s end-to-end network to improve user experience and boost network performance. It also helps to transform raw performance data into actionable insights, allowing you to improve your network performance and ultimately provide a great customer for your consumers.

Overview of PRTG Hosted Monitor

PRTG Hosted Monitor is the improved version of the company’s cloud-based monitoring solution that was introduced in 2017, namely PRTG on demand. It is essentially an all-in-one SaaS solution to monitor your IT infrastructure and promises improved functionality and flexible pricing, subscriptions, and licensing. Since it’s hosted by the company on AWS servers, it takes away some of the hassles of setting it up. Plus, it’s agentless, so you can just use your browser to start monitoring.

SevOne vs PRTG Hosted Monitor: In-depth comparison

1.    Networking monitoring capabilities

• Initial setup and network discovery

SevOne: The tool comes with a quick-start wizard that guides you through the entire discovery and setup. You can specify if there are any subnets you’d like to scan and configure email servers, users, and SNMP community strings. Alerting starts right after discovery. Plus, new devices are discovered automatically. For instance, it can detect new VMs as they’re spun on a host.

PRTG Hosted Monitor: This out-of-the-box solution takes away the hassle of setting up the monitoring environment, making it easy to launch monitoring clusters that can track your systems. You don’t need to worry about maintenance either since the company takes care of it. You also don’t need dedicated hardware for it since the PRTG instance is hosted on AWS servers. 

• Monitoring technologies

SevOne: You can monitor your hardware health, virtualization, and storage with SevOne. Plus, it provides support for various technologies and protocols, including SNMP, VM monitoring, NetFlow, HTTP, Proxy Ping, DNS, NAM, MySQL, IPFIX, ICMP, etc. It can also fetch time-based third-party data for reporting, alerting, and baselining. It has also partnered with numerous organizations like Emulex and Accedian to support integrations. Specialized adapters have also been developed to fetch metrics from vendor EMS when SNMP polling isn’t available.

Hardware monitoring is also vendor agnostic and provides metrics for temperature, fans, power supply, interfaces, CPI, memory, etc. Similarly, when it comes to application monitoring, it can measure the response time even if the app is in the cloud. Plus, it can collect additional metrics from WMI and JMX and monitor different databases including Db2, Oracle, and MySQL.   

PRTG Hosted Monitor: Paessler’s hosted solution offers out-of-the-box monitoring and lets you monitor bandwidth, availability, applications, and traffic. The protocols and technologies it supports include SNMP, SSH for both macOS and Linus systems, WMI, packet sniffing, Windows performance counters, REST APIs that return JSON or XML, SQL, ping, HTTP requests, etc. It also provides numerous remote probes to provide additional options and advanced monitoring.

2. User interface & experience

• Maps & dashboards

SevOne: With SevOne, you get status maps that allow you to view the infrastructure’s health at a glance. Maps can represent some geography, a data center, or even a device, and they include indicators that show alerts and let you take a closer look at the performance detail. Reports and dashboards are basically the same, and you can customize summary information, visualizations, time frames, data source, and settings.

In addition to the prebuilt flow reports, you get flexibility in building dashboards, and you can include a maximum of 200 objects. Reports also take only a few seconds and can include performance metrics, third-party data from different EMS and network probes, status maps, flow data, device configuration details, etc. Plus, you can zoom in in the web UI to check out individual polled values. 

PRTG Hosted Monitor: PRTG Hosted Monitor allows you to visualize your network with the help of real-time maps and live status information. Plus, the integrated drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to build the map. You can also integrate your network components with over 300 map objects, such as toplists, traffic charts, status icons, and devices. You can also make your own map objects by using custom HTML.

The maps are also easy to share. You can share them for both public and private access by providing a URL on the dashboard, either within the company LAN or outside it. And, in addition to the connections and devices, PRTG Hosted Monitor also shows their status information. This makes it easy to spot problems at a glance and troubleshoot before problems escalate.

• Alerting & notification options

SevOne: Notifications and alerts that are displayed on the SevOne dashboards are also sent to users via email and SNMP traps. They’re also sent to the mobile app that’s available for both Android and iOS, where you can ignore, acknowledge, and assign them for follow-up. The tool triggers alerts whenever there are threshold violations (checks whether the threshold levels are static or if they deviate from the baseline performance).

It sends out an alert when the metrics are either above or below the set threshold. Plus, the intelligent thresholds are allowed on all time-based third-party data that are part of the system and not just metrics polled by SevOne.

PRTG Hosted Monitor: PRTG Hosted Monitor also provides flexible alerting and informs you when there are any unusual metrics or when it discovers warnings. Like SevOne, it also sends alerts via email and push notifications and also triggers HTTP requests. Plus, you can get notifications sent directly to your iOS or Android phone thanks to the free app.

Plus, you can adjust the notification system according to your needs. You can also schedule alerts to keep the disturbance to a minimum. For instance, you can set the tool so that it doesn’t send low-priority alerts after office hours. Similarly, you can use acknowledging and dependencies to avoid being flooded by alarms. What makes PRTG Hosted Monitor further stand out is that you can write your own notifications using the PRTG API!

3. Pricing & Licensing

SevOne charges you for every object or element you monitor, while PRTG Hosted Monitor charges you for every ‘aspect’ of your device in the network. Free trial versions are available for both tools. You can monitor a maximum of 1000 objects with the self-hosted version of SevOne without any cost, but NetFlow isn’t included in the free version. Meanwhile, PRTG Hosted Monitor offers a 10-day free trial, and you can track a maximum of 100 aspects within the network.

SevOne charges $5,000 for 1000 nodes while PRTG Hosted Monitor has 5 different plans and you can choose between monthly and yearly subscriptions, so you can try out a monthly plan first and switch to yearly if you like. The details of these 5 plans are as follows:

• Hosted 500: Allows you to monitor up to 500 aspects of the devices (around 50 devices) in your network and costs $149/month. 
• Hosted 1000: Allows you to monitor up to 1000 aspects of the devices (around 100 devices) in your network and costs $279/month. 
• Hosted 2500: Allows you to monitor up to 2500 aspects of the devices (around 250 devices) in your network and costs $599/month.
• Hosted 5000: Allows you to monitor up to 5000 aspects of the devices (around 500 devices) in your network and costs $999/month.   
• Hosted 10000: Allows you to monitor up to 10000 aspects of the devices (around 1000 devices) in your network and costs $1499/month.

Why PRTG Hosted Monitor is Better

It’s quite evident that PRTG Hosted Monitor is better and has many benefits over SevOne, especially if you factor in the cost. Not to mention, you don’t need to deal with the maintenance, setup, and backup since the company takes care of all of this for you. With Paessler, you get a tool that’s ready to use right out of the box. But if you have some specific requirements and aren’t sure if Paessler is the right choice, you can benefit from the 10-day free trial and put the tool to test.