Africa Solution Distributor (ASD) CEO Hennie Moolman

Network monitoring and management is the single most important task the IT department has, with no leeway for downtime in the modern enterprise. But IT administrators across South Africa and pan-Africa are increasingly challenged by growing network complexity and the cost surprises hidden within many network monitoring solutions.

“A lot of people get caught out by the unexpectedly high costs of adding features or endpoints to existing monitoring tools, or by high licence renewal costs,” says Hennie Moolman, CEO of IT network solutions distributor Africa Solution Distributor (ASD).

“In our region, confronted with slow economic growth, IT departments have to deliver excellent customer service within increasingly complex network environments, but they have to achieve this without adding to costs or bringing in additional skills resources. As a result, we are getting around 120 calls a week from resellers and customers enquiring about Paessler’s PRTG network monitoring solution.”

ASD has been the sole African distributor of Paessler PRTG since 2018 and is seeing record uptake across the continent.

“It is a market-leading solution, and the fact that it simplifies and automates network monitoring, and is priced in rands, makes it a compelling solution for IT administrators in our region,” says Moolman. “They want a solution that is easy to deploy, easy to use and highly robust and effective, with no cost surprises. They want to automate IT support and solve issues proactively – without having to bring in more technical staff.”

Paessler PRTG is a highly powerful network monitoring software solution that monitors the whole IT infrastructure, proactively alerting the IT team to any problems before users even notice a problem, and maintaining business uptime for companies of all sizes. 

Today, over 200 000 IT administrators in more than 170 countries rely on PRTG to monitor their business-critical systems, devices and network infrastructures. In April 2019, Paessler was recognised as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools.

According to Gartner: “IT infrastructure monitoring tools capture the availability of the IT infrastructure components that reside in a data centre or are hosted in the cloud as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). These tools monitor and collate the availability and resource utilisation metrics of servers, networks, database instances, hypervisors and storage. Notably, these tools collect metrics in real-time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.”    

Paessler PRTG is up and running within minutes, delivering a smart and simple solution for viewing the entire network, and all systems and applications with a single installation. Featuring auto-discovery and mapping, predefined checks for most common problems, flexible and reliable alerts and custom dashboards in a  full featured Web interface and apps for iOS and Android for a high-level overview, PRTG can also be customised to meet the enterprise’s individual requirements. Enterprises can create dashboards with the PRTG Map Designer and integrate all network components with over 300 different map objects.

PRTG is sensor-based, which means the enterprise is in complete control of what it wants to monitor, with over 250 predefined sensors out of the box and the ability to create custom sensors to suit all monitoring needs. PRTG is an agentless unified monitoring solution. On the one hand, each device or service that has an IP address, or is reachable over IP and talks a protocol (SNMP, HTTP, WMI, xFlow, etc), can be monitored by PRTG probes. On the other hand, there is no need to install agents on monitored devices. With no add-ons, PRTG includes all features in each licence, and keeps its licence renewal costs down to a bare minimum.

“The PRTG list price is the price you pay, as all PRTG versions are full featured with no need for plug-ins. It is one of the lowest cost of ownership monitoring tools on the market,” Moolman says.

For more insights on the future of network monitoring, see: 

https://blog.paessler.com/the-future-of-monitoring-we-wont-care-about-infrastructure-anymore

https://blog.paessler.com/the-future-of-monitoring-the-rise-of-observability

Paessler AG

In 1997, Paessler revolutionised IT monitoring with the introduction of PRTG Network Monitor. Today over 200 000 IT administrators, in more than 170 countries, rely on PRTG to monitor their business-critical systems, devices and network infrastructures. PRTG monitors the entire IT infrastructure, 24/7, and helps IT professionals to seamlessly solve problems before they impact users.

Our mission is to empower technical teams to manage their infrastructure, ensuring maximum productivity. We build lasting partnerships and integrative, holistic solutions to achieve this. Thinking beyond IT networks, Paessler is actively developing solutions to support digital transformation strategies and the Internet of things.

Learn more about Paessler and PRTG at www.paessler.com.

ASD Africa Solution Distributor 

Africa Solution Distributor is a value-added distributor of best-of-breed, best-in-class IT solutions used by managed service providers and value-added resellers. The solutions it offers range from products used by IT companies to consolidate their in-house systems and billing, to front-office solutions to manage ASD's customers easier and faster, and to provide better support.