Paessler PRTG – The painless alternative to Netreo

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Netreo depends on several factors, such as your specific network monitoring needs, budget, and technical resources available in your organization.

PRTG is ideal:

• If you prefer an all-in-one, easy-to-use solution with minimal setup time.
• If you need sophisticated, customizable visualizations like dashboards and network maps.
• If you want to monitor an unlimited number of remote locations and networks at no extra cost.
• If you prefer high scalability and a software tailored to large, complex environments.
• If you want to get real-time alerting, custom notifications, and automated reporting.
• If you want to have the choice between an on-premises or cloud-based solution.
• If you want a straightforward licensing model at a comparatively low price.

Netreo might be your choice:

• If you require extensive, granular customization
• If your infrastructure has enough resource capacity for high-frequency data collection
• If you're happy to pay for advanced features as and when you need them
• If you're comfortable configuring your monitoring environment and integrations manually

While any network monitoring solution will require some manual configuration, if you have a large IT infrastructure or need complex monitoring capabilities, setting up PRTG Network Monitor couldn't be simpler. 

Auto-discovery detects every network device and component within a given IP address range and assigns the right sensors. And drag-and-drop interfaces make it easy to configure your monitoring environment just the way you like it. 

Netreo, on the other hand, needs a fair amount of manual configuration even in cases where you need a fairly basic IT monitoring setup. That's great if you want as much control as possible over every aspect of your IT environment, but not so much if you have limited resources and more pressing priorities to be getting on with.

Not to blow our own trumpet, but we'd argue PRTG wins out on Netreo hands-down, because it's easier to deploy and scales much more transparently. PRTG uses a system of remote probes that collect performance metrics locally, in real time, and transmit the data securely to your core server. These probes can buffer data and reconnect automatically should the connection drops, so there are no monitoring gaps. 

By contrast, to use Netreo for distributed monitoring, you'll need to deploy service engines in each remote location you want to monitor. This increases infrastructural overhead and complexity, because you'll need to configure every one of them manually. 

PRTG's sensor-based pricing is also more predictable than Netreo's resource-based approach, so it works better at scale as there won't be any unpleasant billing surprises.

Yes, really. You don't pay anything for the first 100 sensors, ever. And they come with our full suite of monitoring features included. You need about 5 to 10 sensors per device, on average, to monitor them effectively. So this means you could monitor up to 20 devices free of charge. 

Our paid plans are also sensor-based, with all features included. So, even as you grow, you only pay for the devices you need to monitor. 

Netreo, on the other hand, doesn't have a free plan. It charges per resource, with a 100 resource minimum. A resource is a hardware device, virtual machine, cloud resource, or specific type of synthetic check. Some resources consume an entire licence while others only consume part of a licence, which makes the structure somewhat untransparent.

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive. On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.