In 2026, you face a perfect storm of multi-cloud complexity, IT/OT convergence, and tightening regulation. This article gives you a practical outlook on what will change in monitoring, how AI and security trends will shape your decisions, and where solutions like Paessler PRTG can help you turn visibility into advantage for sysadmins responsible for their company's IT infrastructure and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) alike.

How much does IT downtime really cost your organization?

Most executives think it's just an annoying blip on the radar. But if you've ever been on the receiving end of a 3 AM call because the production server went down, you know better. Studies put the number at over $5,000 per minute for large organizations. Per minute. That's the cost of your CEO unable to access email, sales teams locked out of CRM systems, and customers abandoning shopping carts.

[Update] Ironically, as soon as this blog went live, Cloudflare went down! So I will use this opportunity to say... I told you so! Keep reading to find out why.

Someone, at some point in time, (hopefully some kind of professional network engineer) designed your network. They drew a pretty picture with multicolored lines showing traffic flowing between a primary path and a secondary path. Oh, and this plan also had a budget and important management buy-in. Then they moved on to another company, country, or just a better job, and what you've been left with is a Frankenstein's monster of temporary-band-aid solutions to real problems that all became permanent circa 2015. Your so-called redundant paths? One goes down, and the other follows like some kind of tragic Romeo and Juliet situation - it's heartbreaking.

You can't fix what you can't see.

That's the fundamental problem every IT team is up against when trying to keep their network humming along. Right now, there's almost certainly a bandwidthbottleneck building up somewhere in your infrastructure. An unauthorized device plugging into the network. Encrypted traffic containing something it shouldn't. The question isn't whether these things are happening. They are. The question is whether you can actually see them when they do.

Network traffic monitoring is one of the most crucial tasks for any IT professional or sysadmin. Whether you’re troubleshooting performance issues, hunting for security vulnerabilities, or optimizing bandwidth usage, understanding how to effectively monitor network traffic can be the difference between a healthy network infrastructure and costly outages.

It's always DNS. Unless it's not. Then it's the network. Or perhaps the firewall? Or wait, actually, according to Chris in accounting, it's CERTAINLY malware because his nephew 'knows computers'. Welcome to every network performance troubleshooting discussion ever because everyone is an expert and all you get to do is smile politely.

We are excited to announce a major step forward in OT monitoring: PRTG multi-platform probe is now available on the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace. This partnership bridges the gap between IT and OT environments. It gives customers better visibility and more direct control over their industrial operations.

Your digital transformation is only as good as the technology that supports it, which is why it's so important to maintain the system health and performance of your infrastructure. Do you have microservices or distributed systems to keep track of? Cloud-native apps, container workloads, Kubernetes environments, or multicloud systems? You need to see what's happening across your entire IT landscape, and the critical question is, how do you do that?

Throughout 2025, our Monitoring Matters webinar series has been packed with practical advice, live demos, and expert tips to help you monitor the most important components of your IT infrastructure. Whether you’re monitoring network devices, virtualization, physical servers, power, or storage, these sessions are packed with information you can immediately put into practice.

Network loops are one of the few pieces of evidence that the universe loves to laugh at us. Somewhere, right this minute, a five-dollar Ethernet cable is taking down a million-dollar infrastructure. An innocent intern trying to get internet in the conference room has both ends of a patch cable plugged into the same switch, and now 500 employees are staring at the spinning wheel of doom. Meanwhile, the CEO's slideshow presentation is stuck on the same slide for the umpteenth time, and the accounting department rocking back and forth crying, "Remember the good old days of the pre-internet world?"

Manual network configuration is slow, error-prone, and doesn’t scale. Human error causes 70-75% of all network outages, and the average cost of 1 hour of network downtime has now surpassed $300,000 for enterprise organizations. Network automation helps solve both issues by eliminating manual configuration tasks and introducing consistency across your entire infrastructure.

If you're using an RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) solution or IT management tool, you may ask yourself if you need another piece of monitoring software as well. The question is valid, and we get it. Many IT professionals and sysadmins want to know how using Paessler PRTG Network Monitor can benefit them when they already have an endpoint or patch management tool.

Monitoring network devices is a must-have for network admins, but they need to do it securely. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has helped millions of admins collect information and monitor networks over the past several decades. SNMP has had security improvements over the years, and that has resulted in three versions, v1, v2c, and v3, but the first two send information unencrypted.

You're on a video call with a client when suddenly their voice turns into a garbled mess of stuttering syllables. The screen freezes mid-sentence, and by the time the video catches up, you've missed half the conversation. Sound familiar? That's network jitter at work, and it's the silent killer of real-time communication.

Network latency can make or break user experience. Gamers feel every millisecond of delay; video conferencing teams struggle when jittery lag ruins every session; business application users watch productivity tank as they wait for slow responses.
You've probably spent more time troubleshooting network issues than you would like. Worst of all? End-users do not care about your router settings or bandwidth. They only care that things are supposed to work fast and often do not.

Microsoft SQL Server databases power many applications that are the lifeblood of businesses in today’s data-driven world. Whether your servers are on-premises or hosted in Azure, your company relies on the availability of your SQL Server instances to power your applications. However, poorly performing databases can have a negative impact on user experience and revenue generation and slow productivity throughout your business.

When users complain of dropped video calls, stuttering applications, or files that won't upload properly, 90% of the time you can probably blame packet loss. It's one of those network performance issues that make you feel like the whole network is shot, even when your equipment is fine.

Great news for your monitoring setup! We've just released PRTG version 25.4.112 to the stable release channel. This version brings you the new SNMP Linux Disk Free v2 sensor, several security improvements, and updated language files for German and Spanish.

Let me guess. You've been staring at a screen for an hour trying to solve some cryptic connectivity issue. Your boss or a colleague just walks by and asks, "Do we have a topology diagram for this?"

You then head over to that shared folder and dig out some Visio file from 2017. Your eyes scan over the network diagram showing equipment that has not been in your data center since your last regime. Sound familiar?

Truth is, your network already has a topology. The issue is, your diagrams don't match it anymore.