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Network monitoring solutions specialist Paessler announced it is further extending its support to PRTG Network Monitor Freeware Edition users by increasing the number of available sensors, or measuring points, to 30 from 10.
The company said that with 30 sensors, users can better accommodate their complex IT networks as well as the list of features offered in PRTG Network Monitor, one of the company’s network monitoring offering.
About 200 sensor choices are available including options for Windows WMI, Linux/Unix/OS X, VoIP/QoS, SQL database servers and others.
“Small or midsize companies would find this solution most useful, but it also has applications at large companies across all industries depending on their IT communications and entire IT infrastructure, Dirk Paessler, the company’s founder and CEO,” told eWEEK. “This freeware version can benefit anyone looking to assure performance, availability, and monitor the long-term trends of their communications, devices, applications and services.”
The increased sensor capacity in PRTG Network Monitor Freeware Edition, combined with Paessler’s lineup of sensor types, gives users a broader range of new monitoring options. For example, users can monitor their organization’s entire email process including Microsoft Exchange.
“Businesses depend on their communications tools, including email, VoIP, and video conferencing, running smoothly over the network. PRTG Network Monitor offers visibility into the entire email send and receive cycle, VoIP and streaming media quality,” Paessler explained. “If any issues occur, PRTG will send an alert to the person in charge, so that IT can be sure that critical communications infrastructure stays online, without performance degradation.”
PRTG Network Monitor Freeware Edition offers Exchange Powershell-based sensors for monitoring backups, databases and email queues, along with a range of WMI sensors. Additional pre-defined sensors support monitoring of POP3, SMTP and IMAP servers.
The company makes money with the commercial versions of PRTG, as the freeware version is limited to 30 sensors, which is sufficient to monitor a company’s communications tools such as email, VoIP or streaming media.
“The freeware comes with the entire feature set of all commercial versions, so it might also be used to monitor an entire network using SNMP Traps or Syslog, to monitor traffic going through Cisco devices using NetFlow, storage systems such as NetApp, or anything else in an IT environment,” Paessler said. “The 30 sensor limitation means that the freeware will work perfectly for one of those tasks, but if an IT department wants to do all that and more, they would need a larger, commercial license, which range in price depending on the number of sensors.”
PRTG Network Monitor Freeware Edition offers the entire feature set of the full version including database, reporting, alerting and notifications.
In addition, users of the Freeware Edition can automatically upgrade to the compliment of 30 sensors using the Auto-Update feature, while new users can receive all 30 sensors by downloading the freeware version.
“Network monitoring is of great importance in today’s businesses, where a well-performing and reliable IT infrastructure is absolutely critical,” Paessler said. “The right monitoring solution assures performance and reliability of the entire IT infrastructure, whether it’s for traffic, for virtual environments, hardware, applications, or websites.”