So, which Monitoring tool can you recommend?

There are many choices available in the Infrastructure Monitoring Tool market these days, with a vast array of capability, complexity and cost, not to mention levels of management, resource and support required.

Are you looking for a tool (and someone to manage it) to help provide constant vigilance across your IT landscape with performance, capacity and uptime information at your fingertips?  

Do you want the status (good or bad) and visibility of your Servers, Switches, Routers, VPN, Access Points, Firewalls, Virtual environments, Google Analytics, Internet Bandwidth and Disk capacity via one Dashboard?  

Brewstercat Technology Consulting, an independent tech company based in Melbourne, Australia, can help small to medium businesses with a professional deployment of a Network Monitoring solution, at a competitive cost, and with ongoing support and development. 

PRTG is one of the best tools for Monitoring because it is very reliable, has been tried and tested by us and many other companies globally, and is sure to work very well across your Technology landscape too. 

The tool is based on using Sensors to accrue information about specific elements within your IT landscape.

A 'Sensor' is one item that you can monitor on a device, such as the CPU load on a Server, a Port on a switch, a specific URL or the traffic of a network connection. 

For a small business that may only need up to 100 sensors, about a dozen devices or so, the software license is free.  

Beyond that, the perpetual software license cost scales depending on the number of sensors required per IT environment, starting from around AUD $2,700 for 500 sensors (about 50 or so devices).

PRTG is a well-known and respected brand with excellent vendor support, is powerful yet easy to use, is agentless, has a broad feature set utilising a broad range of protocols, and runs On-Premise or in the Cloud.

The Application, easily hosted on a Windows Server, comes with about 200 out of the box sensors providing a solid basis and integration with many vendors, devices and applications.   

There’s also a wide scope for creating custom sensors that can be implemented to match more specific business needs.

It can even let you know if the roller door has been left open!

The PRTG monitoring application polls your entire IT infrastructure all day and night (usually at 5-minute intervals, but is customisable) to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly, and to alert you if problems are detected.

One of the first tasks during the initial setup is to run a Discovery to scour your environment to automatically find all the connected devices.  

These are added to the Portal along with a set of basic sensors that vary depending on the type of device.  

For example, a standard Ping will be added to check that the device is UP and connected to the Network, and from there an array of diverse sensors can be added per device to really drill into standard specific components, and to focus on what is important to you, like disk capacity or failure, Network and Internet bandwidth, Ransomware file encryption and Cloud environment health.  

If the polling detects an error, fault or failure outside the set threshold levels of being OK, thus in a Warning or Critical state, an alert notification will be automatically generated to Managers, Administrators, Support teams and Ticketing systems, depending on Priority and who needs to know.  

There’s plenty of variety when it comes to the way alert notifications get sent out too, including by email, text message, to a Pager, Push to mobile device, even to Microsoft Teams or Slack. 

Whatever way the message gets to someone who can investigate, the bottom line is that it has provided visibility and an opportunity to improve your IT world.  

Please contact Brewstercat Technology Consulting to get your Monitoring going today!