Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Prometheus

4.1K
3.7K
+ 1
239
PRTG

56
64
+ 1
0
Add tool

PRTG vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this document, we will compare the key differences between PRTG and Prometheus monitoring systems.

  1. Data Collection and Monitoring Approach: PRTG is an agent-based monitoring solution that relies on installed probes to collect data from devices and sensors. It offers a centralized and intuitive web-based interface for monitoring. On the other hand, Prometheus follows a pull model where applications expose metrics and Prometheus pulls the data using HTTP. It collects and stores time-series data in a time series database (TSDB) for analysis and alerting purposes.

  2. Scalability and High Availability: PRTG is designed as a single-instance solution, which means it doesn't support horizontal scaling or high availability out of the box. It can be suitable for small to medium-sized environments. However, Prometheus is built to scale horizontally by deploying multiple instances that work in a federated manner. This allows it to handle large-scale deployments and also provides built-in high availability options.

  3. Alerting and Notification: PRTG includes a comprehensive alerting system that can send notifications via email, SMS, push notifications, or execute custom actions. It supports granular alerting rules and alert escalations. Prometheus also allows users to define alerting rules, but it relies on external integrations (like Alertmanager) for notifications. This separation allows users to customize the alerting workflow and use various notification channels.

  4. Metric Query Language: PRTG uses a proprietary query language that allows users to create custom sensors and define custom thresholds. It provides a wide range of built-in sensors and supports common protocols such as SNMP, WMI, and HTTP. On the other hand, Prometheus uses PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) for querying and processing metrics. PromQL provides a rich set of functions and operators that enable flexible data retrieval and aggregation.

  5. Integrations and Ecosystem: PRTG offers integrations with various third-party systems and technologies, including cloud platforms, virtualization platforms, databases, and network monitoring tools. It also provides a RESTful API for custom integrations. Prometheus has a strong ecosystem with a wide range of exporters, which enable it to monitor popular applications, services, and infrastructure components. It can be easily integrated with Grafana for visualization and alerting.

  6. Community and Support: PRTG is a commercial product developed by Paessler AG and comes with paid support options. It has an active user community and a dedicated support team. Prometheus, on the other hand, is an open-source project with a large and vibrant community. It benefits from community-driven development and has extensive documentation, online forums, and meetup events. Support for Prometheus is typically provided through community channels and forums.

In summary, PRTG is an agent-based, centralized monitoring solution with comprehensive alerting features. It is suitable for smaller environments and offers good out-of-the-box functionality. Prometheus, on the other hand, follows a pull-based approach, supports scalability, high availability, and has a rich ecosystem of exporters. It provides powerful querying capabilities but may require more customization and integration efforts.

Advice on Prometheus and PRTG
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 774.9K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

See more
Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 560.2K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

See more
Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

See more
Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

See more
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

See more
Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 704.5K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

See more
Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

See more
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Prometheus
Pros of PRTG
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
    Be the first to leave a pro

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Prometheus
    Cons of PRTG
    • 12
      Just for metrics
    • 6
      Bad UI
    • 6
      Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
    • 4
      Not easy to configure and use
    • 3
      Supports only active agents
    • 2
      Written in Go
    • 2
      TLS is quite difficult to understand
    • 2
      Requires multiple applications and tools
    • 1
      Single point of failure
      Be the first to leave a con

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Prometheus?

      Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

      What is PRTG?

      It can monitor and classify system conditions like bandwidth usage or uptime and collect statistics from miscellaneous hosts as switches, routers, servers and other devices and applications.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Prometheus?
      What companies use PRTG?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Prometheus or PRTG.
      Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Prometheus?
      What tools integrate with PRTG?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      Blog Posts

      Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

      DigitalOcean

      GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
      2
      2352
      May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

      Rancher Labs

      KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
      5
      1486
      PythonDockerKubernetes+14
      12
      2597
      Node.jsnpmKubernetes+6
      1
      1402
      What are some alternatives to Prometheus and PRTG?
      Datadog
      Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
      Grafana
      Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
      New Relic
      The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
      InfluxDB
      InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. It has a built-in HTTP API so you don't have to write any server side code to get up and running. InfluxDB is designed to be scalable, simple to install and manage, and fast to get data in and out.
      Splunk
      It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
      See all alternatives