Red Education training partner
Paessler
PRTG: the network monitoring standard of the mid-market.
Paessler builds PRTG, the sensor-based monitoring platform that thousands of IT teams use as their single pane for network, server, and infrastructure health.
Red Education carries Paessler across all five of its regional schedules, delivering official PRTG training that turns the tool most admins learn by osmosis into a discipline taught properly.
Founded in 1997 by Dirk Paessler in Nuremberg, Germany, the company has stayed focused and independent for nearly three decades, an increasingly rare trajectory in this catalogue of acquisitions. PRTG's sensor model made monitoring approachable for teams without a tooling budget the size of their network.
Founding stories
Paessler
Paessler began the way German engineering companies do: with a student annoyed by a tool. Dirk Paessler, writing software for the Fireball search engine in 1997, built the Webserver Stress Tool when his own code kept crashing servers - then, needing to monitor a growing network and refusing to fight MRTG's seven pages of installation instructions, wrote PRTG Traffic Grapher instead (the name itself a tip of the hat to MRTG). Paessler GmbH followed on August 22, 2001, the AG in 2005 - and the company grew from a dorm project to half a million users in 190 countries with no venture capital at all, the Mittelstand counter-story to every funding-led vendor on these pages.
The timeline
- A student, a vision, a garage
Dirk Paessler's Fireball work spawns the Webserver Stress Tool - the fore-runner - and the frustration with MRTG that will become PRTG.
- Paessler GmbH
Founded August 22, 2001; PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor sell as shareware while the company graduates from living room to office.
- PRTG Network Monitor
Traffic Grapher and IPCheck merge into PRTG Network Monitor 7 - one product, sensors for everything, licensed by sensor count: the shape PRTG keeps to this day. The company had moved to Nuremberg, by the castle, the year before.
- The founder steps back
Dirk Paessler hands the CEO role on (Christian Twardawa, then Helmut Binder in 2019) with the company past 300 people - still family-and-employee owned, still monitoring-only by explicit strategy.
- Turn/River: the first outside capital
May 23, 2024: Turn/River Capital makes a strategic investment - after 27 years of purely organic growth to 500,000+ users, the first institutional money in the company's history, opening the OT and enterprise expansion chapter.
Paessler/Turn-River joint announcement.
Flagship products and solutions
- PRTG Network MonitorThe flagship: agentless monitoring by sensors - SNMP, WMI, NetFlow, packet sniffing, HTTP, and hundreds more - with maps, alerting, and reporting in one install.
- PRTG Enterprise MonitorThe large-environment edition: multi-server horizontal scale with the ITOps Board on top.
- PRTG Hosted MonitorThe same engine as a hosted service - monitoring without owning the monitoring server.
Key innovations
- Monitoring the admin actually enjoysPRTG's bet was usability: auto-discovery, sensible defaults, and an interface a generalist admin could own - network monitoring as a product, not a project.
- The organic-growth proofHalf a million users across 190 countries with no venture funding for 27 years - evidence that disciplined product focus can build a global vendor on revenue alone.
Main markets
The SMB-to-midmarket monitoring standard, expanding upward and into OT and industrial environments - against SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and the open-source stacks, with the sensor-based licensing model as its signature.
Analyst standing
- A perennial of the network-monitoring recommendation lists and midmarket evaluations - the category's usability benchmark more than its feature-count leader.
Red Education recognition
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Best Cybersecurity Education Provider
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Best Cybersecurity Certification Training
- Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2025 - Cybersecurity Instructor Team of the Year
- 100,000+ students trained across 132 countries; 4.9-star average from 5,000+ reviews