v18 First Impressions

The new UI is unusable for me. I have no idea what browser was used to test it, but using Chrome on an ultra-widescreen makes this look really, really bad. The wrong elements are emphasized with this setup. White on white is unreadable. Device names are in a too-small, too-gray font. I found the option to set the UI 'dark' mode which helped a little, but on a very wide screen the menus are too spread-out. It makes navigation difficult and frustrating. I really REALLY don't need a giant 'add sensor' button visible in the display with every other sensor. I have painfully bright lines down the left side of the display that are pointless while the lines around each sensor fade into the background making the whole thing muddled together. When I mouse over 'Setup' the end of the 'System Administration' option is hidden under the scroll bar. At the top 'New Log Entries' is sometimes the first thing presented, and sometimes appears in between the red 'New Alarms' and the red down sensor counter. The controls for 'Overview, 2 days, 30 days, 365 days' are lined up right alongside 'Log' 'Management' 'Settings' 'Notifications' 'Comments' and 'History' as if they're controls for the same object/function. I immediately get a headache as soon as I look at this screen. I could not be more unhappy with the changes. I was extremely pleased with the previous UI and would like to request the option to return to it please as soon as possible. When I mouse over the inexplicable '+' sign at the top-right (why is this big distracting blue + sign here?) a big menu pops up that won't go away when I move the mouse away. Clicking the plus sign does nothing in and of itself. It's just an annoying hot-spot on the screen that I have to avoid so my display isn't cluttered (any more than it already is). The graph section on the right is dominated by a map of the US that I can't get rid of while the graphs are teeny-tiny and difficult to read. A large section of my display is wasted with this useless map.

I had my problems with the old UI, but it was so, SO much better. This whole thing looks like it was made by a teenager trying to copy Microsoft's horrible tablet interface.

https://imgur.com/ESH2QhF

https://imgur.com/4Ulw00s

https://imgur.com/vVBtHTv

Thank you Arne, and apologies for my frustration, but there is something about the choice of fonts and colors that immediately gave me a migraine headache. I wear glasses, and looking again today, I still have the same problem when I use the default white background. The dark background is not much better. Whatever fonts and options you've chosen, they appear very blurry in random places while others are crisp and clean. I've been using PRTG since 2003, and I've seen it go through a lot of changes, but it seems to me that smaller, incremental changes would be less disruptive and/or the ability to select as a user the option to use the previous UI.

I was thankful to be able to find the option to disable the geomapping panel, but for the 'Devices' display I would really like to be able to disable some of the other features. When I'm in the device overview, I want to dedicate the space to just that. The 2-day, 30-day and 365-day graphs on the right are meaningless to me. Likewise, the selection at the top for those is meaningless and distracting when I'm looking at an overall summary of hundreds of devices. In this context, what does 'Traffic Index' actually MEAN?

I understand there were design decisions made that resulted in this. As a daily user of the product, I am saying those decisions were largely the wrong ones.

Overall, the biggest complaint I have about the new interface is just the general difficulty in reading it. The graph thumbnails are now too small, too grey, and too undefined to warrant even being there. The UI elements that are most important to me to see are in grays while the least-important elements are in the brightest most distracting colors, and visually the flow between controls and the UI elements they control is too often interrupted by other elements. There is no option to control the colors of individual UI elements, and the 'Add Sensors' is present in too many places where it doesn't make sense.

Besides the visual distaste, in the two days since I upgraded, I have also found performance to be suffering terribly with slow response to clicks, poor scrolling and slower page loads than before. There are also a number of places where improper text wrapping choices can cause massive disconcerting shifts as the entire UI moves around to accomodate new info that's displayed on mouse-over. These should be unnecessary if the fonts scaled and wrapped properly as they once did. Many of the convenient floating controls & displays are now missing, which sometimes makes navigation/operation more complicated than it was. As I said, smaller, incremental changes are easier to swallow.

Dear Michael,

the traffic index was already present in the old interface. Please find its explanation here.

When we showed the new interface in a closed test to some first users, we got a lot of positive feedback, encouraging us to do it. Yes, we also had sometimes to look where something is, because some elements are in other locations now. While we want to follow the according interface guidelines (material IO) we accept that this is still PRTG and will bring back color-filled table rows for alarms with the next release. The performance will be improved with the next release as well.

We also finally made an interface which works as a mobile web interface. Earlier, PRTG had a completely different mobile layout. The new interface, while looking a bit differently in lower resolutions, is much less different.

You are right, there is not much choice in color, except for a new dark theme, but we rather put our effort in creating the one good interface, than letting the user customize. Adding and testing customization options requires development resources we rather put into the more polish of the default interface. Regarding the contrast of colors, we get different feedback but overall it is liked.

We wanted to have one big cut. Small, incremental change would mean a user has constantly to adapt to interface changes. As it turns out, we still have to optimize it, some more changes will come with the version after the next. Please understand that while we hear and respect your opinion and are sorry that we didn't hit the mark for you and other users, the overall feedback is that beside some smaller things and some glitches we will address in the future, the new interface is welcomed.

Updated today to version 18.1.37.12158, and I see some marked improvements, but have the following notes.

1) Download graph in PNG and Download graph in SVG links use the same icon which looks like a mistake at first glance. (Also can be confusing in the event there is no mouse-over)

2) Numbers in columns vary from as low as 1 (ie 4%) up to 14-15 (ie 3.76666666666667%) significant digits and are centered instead of right-aligned or left-aligned

3) When UI is set to dark mode, and you pop out a graph to a separate window, the title/header at the top of the graph is in black which is unreadable against the dark grey background

4) Unnecessary abbreviation of sensor names in the display (ie "Disk F..." could/should be "Disk Free"

5) The pop-up menu from the '+' sign still won't go away when you move the mouse away but requires a click.

6) When you select '2-days' or '30 days' etc, the titles of the graphs are needlessly abbreviated "SSL Certific ..." "System Hea ..." "(007) Adapt ..."

7) Menus are not responsive. There is a half-second delay after mouse-over before the menu appears.

8) Is there any way to get rid of the 'Recommended Sensors' section?

9) The icons for 'pause', 'open new ticket', 'send link by email', 'check now', 'delete', and the drop-down for the device menu are all very small and out-of the way. The positioning of the delete icon right next to the menu drop-down is also awkward and makes it likely to be accidentally clicked. Can these not be increased in size and moved to a more prominent position? Those controls are the one part of the page that I most frequently use within the device view.

10) One big problem I still have with this new UI is the way everything has been rearranged so that the most relevant information is shoved aside and relegated to small areas of the display while things that are less-important to me are front & center. When I click on a sensor for Network Traffic, CPU, or RAM, this new UI displays a very large 'speed gauge' fror the current total, but the live graph is now in a very small column to the right. I felt the speed gauges were a great addition to the UI when used in the right places. They're fantastic at the device level to quickly see the status for multiple sensors/sensor types. But when I click to view a sensor, I really don't want to see the data displayed this way. I want the raw number(s) and the recent graph. I also don't want to see any suggestions or similar sensors. The display with the graph at the top and the raw data below was the best way for me to quickly and easily see what I needed to see. It also makes a lot more sense to have a single graph displayed at the top of frame with the 2-day/30-days/365-days controls displayed as tabs to choose which of the graphs I want to see.

Dear Michael,

the recommended sensors can be disabled in the Setup, System Administration / Monitoring. The similar sensor analysis can be disabled on the settings tab of the root node, in the section "Advanced Sensor Analysis".

About the other things, we are looking at abbreviation issues and some other glitches.

I've just upgraded to v18.1.38.11958 from 17.1.?, so the interface is totally new for me. The first thing I noticed is that when I click on Sensors, the column showing the names of the sensors is very cramped. Can that be adjusted?

If I searchfilter for a sensor, that column is even more cramped, yet it displays less columns. Can the width be adjusted there too?

I can show more characters by adjusting the browser font size, but it's not really enough at practical font sizes, especially when searching.

Dear Peter,

the columns cannot be adjusted, but I agree that the current look is not optimal in many situations. While we did improve many tables already, some are not yet refined. Because we try to release new versions rather sooner than later, we don't pack that many changes in each update. That means in can take multiple releases until improved tables are released.

But if you still see inconveniently scaled columns with PRTG 18.2.40, please contact us at [email protected] with screenshots.