PRTG Traffic Grapher is an easy to use Windows software for monitoring and classifying bandwidth usage. It provides system administrators with live readings and long-term usage trends for their network devices. The most common usage is bandwidth usage monitoring, but you can also monitor many other aspects of your network like memory and CPU utilizations.

Features:

* Reliable network monitoring used by more than 80.000 users every day
* Supports data acquisition via SNMP, packet sniffing or Netflow protocol
* Classifies network traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters
* Works with most switches, routers, firewalls, and other network devices
* Easy installation with a few clicks on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003
* Monitoring engine is capable of monitoring up to several thousand sensors

What's New:

The new software has been completely rewritten from the ground up. We have taken our experiences from more than 10 years of creating network monitoring software and the feedback from more than 100,000 users worldwide to create a completely new architecture which is able to provide bandwidth and usage monitoring, as well as uptime monitoring and alerting for all sizes of networks - small to large.

Besides the new architecture, the biggest change is that PRTG7 now adds almost the full functionality of IPCheck5 to the features of PRTG6.

Please have a look at the following list for a detailed comparison:
Most Noticable Changes Between Version 6 and 7 of PRTG

* PRTG7's new user interface is completely web based and is used for configuration and data review
* PRTG6 had a Windows GUI for configuration and data review plus a read-only web interface for review only
* PRTG7 offers more than 30 new sensortypes for monitoring of many different protocols and services (e.g. HTTP, WMI, FTP, SMTP, RDP, etc)
* PRTG6 could only monitor via SNMP, PING, Netflow and Packet Sniffing
* PRTG7's new monitoring engine and internal architecture is much faster and more powerful and is now able to support several 10,000 sensors for one installation
* For PRTG6 we recommended not to monitor more than 2,000 sensors per installation
* PRTG7 adds uptime and availability monitoring to PRTG6's bandwidth and network usage monitoring
* PRTG6 offered bandwidth and usage monitoring only
* PRTG7's new automatic network discovery finds devices, analyzes the device type and creates the appropiate set of sensors for the device. And it can be re-run to discover devices added to the network later.
* PRTG's auto discovery could only be run interactively and could only find SNMP devices.
* PRTG7's new packet sniffer can optionally look into the network packets' payload data to find out what kind of data they contain (e.g. HTTP, Mail protocols, NETBIOS, etc.)
* PRTG6's packet sniffer simply looked at the from-port and to-port numbers to categorize the traffic
* PRTG7 uses a "single-core/multiple-probe" architecture: One central monitoring system can gather monitoring data from various points inside and outside of your network using "probes"
* PRTG6 could only monitor devices and traffic inside the LAN from the location where it was installed
* PRTG7 can send notifications via Email, SMS, HTTP, Windows System Log, Network Broadcast, ICQ, MSN, YAHOO and AIM
* PRTG6 could only send notifications as an email, a HTTP request or run an EXE file.
* PRTG7 offers dependencies (pauses monitoring of some sensors while another sensor is down, i.e. to avoid unnecessary notifications)
* PRTG6 did not offer this feature at all
* PRTG7 works with "NetFlow Sensors" (one or more for each device). All commercial licenses include 2 NetFlow Sensors for free, more sensors can be licensed). An unlimited number of sensors can share one "NetFlow Collector Port" to create different views of one NetFlow device.
* PRTG6 worked with "NetFlow Collectors" (one for each device, had to be purchased separately).
* PRTG7 Freeware offers up to 10 sensors with a minimum interval of 1 minute
* PRTG6 Freeware offered up to 3 sensors with a minimum interval of 1 second
* PRTG7 offers a new feature called "Maps" that can be used to create web pages with current monitoring results and custom layout
* PRTG6 offered "Custom Graphs" which were too complicated for most users and offered limited functionality compared to "Maps"
* PRTG7 has a built-in mail server that delivers emails to the recipient using "MX records" (using an SMTP relay is optional)
* PRTG6 always required the use of an SMTP relay server

PRTG6 Functionality Not Included in PRTG7

The following features from PRTG6 are not included in PRTG7 yet and will be added with version 7.1 later this year:

* PRTG 7 does not offer "Toplists"
* PRTG 7 does not offer custom colors for the graphs yet
* PRTG 7 does not calculate "Percentiles" in reports
* PRTG 7 does not include an "Aggregation Sensor"
* PRTG 7 is not available in other languages than English (more language will be available soon)

The following features have been dropped and will likely not be re-implemented soon (please continue to use PRTG 6 for these functions):

* PRTG 7 does not offer a bandwidth-based billing system
* PRTG 7 does not create reports in Excel format (HTML and PDF only)
* PRTG 7 does not offer PRTG6's "Limit Lines" feature of PRTG 6 (planned for a later version)
* PRTG 7 does not offer the WLAN-specific Packet Sniffing features of PRTG6