FEATURE Smart factories
MONITORING GAINS MOMENTUM
Maximilian Greiner, VP Product Management at Paessler, explains why unified monitoring is becoming essential for managing complexity, minimising disruption, and responding to emerging risks
A
s organisations across the UK continue to modernise infrastructure, expand hybrid environments, and connect
IT with operational technology (OT), monitoring has become far more than an IT support function. It is now central to operational resilience, cybersecurity, and business continuity. Visibility across systems, applications, networks, and industrial environments is no longer optional; it is critical for reducing downtime, improving response times, and maintaining trust in increasingly complex operations.
That is why the most important story in monitoring right now is not a single feature, it’s momentum. When a platform evolves consistently, it reflects the direction the market is moving and the pressures organisations face day to day. This can be seen in platforms delivering regular updates, stronger enterprise visibility, and an increasing focus on industrial edge. Six stable releases in one-year signals that monitoring is becoming more like a living operational layer than a static tool. Environments are changing too quickly for long gaps between improvements, especially when security, identity, cloud services, and edge deployments are all moving targets. Monitoring platforms sit at the centre of operational truth; they tell teams what is happening and what has changed. The six stable releases PRTG shipped in 2025 focused on usability, security, and scalability. Audit logging addressed a core governance need: understanding who changed what and when. This matters when multiple admins manage systems, when third parties have access, or when regulated environments require traceability. SSO support via PRTG’s new UI and API v2 reflects a wider shift; identity is now an operational dependency. If access control is difficult to manage at scale, it becomes a risk in itself.
10 June 2026 | Automation
In the last year, sensors moved out of BETA, new ones were introduced, and modernisation continued with v2 sensors aligned to the PRTG multi-platform probe. Sensor migrations and improved device templates also played a role. For many UK organisations, the barrier to better monitoring is not ambition, but time. Standardisation is what makes monitoring sustainable across a growing estate. The point is not that every organisation needs every feature. Monitoring must keep pace with what organisations run now and what they will run next.
One of the most consequential developments in the last year has been the PRTG multi-platform probe joining the Siemens Industrial Edge ecosystem, an open platform that brings together applications, devices, and data across industrial environments. This reflects what is happening across UK industry - operational environments are becoming more connected, and data needs to move from machines to analytics platforms and service teams.
Edge computing has become the bridge between physical and digital operations. However, OT environments have been difficult to monitor due to different protocols and ownership. The PRTG multi-platform probe is designed for this reality. It is lightweight, container friendly, and deployable on Linux, ARM, or Docker. It supports OPC UA, Modbus TCP, and MQTT alongside SNMP. For organisations managing production,
utilities, transport, or large facilities, this reduces the effort required to achieve a single view. Instead of separate tools, there is a clearer route to unified visibility. In one reported case, teams were able to identify the source of incidents 25 percent faster following deployment. Faster diagnosis directly affects downtime and incident response. As monitoring estates grow, the challenge is not only collecting data but presenting it clearly. Enterprise environments often run multiple monitoring servers, leading to fragmented views. PRTG Multi Core Dashboards, built using PRTG Data Exporter with Grafana, enable visualisation across servers in one view. Stakeholders see the same truth without wasting time reconciling data. When incidents occur, the question is not only what failed, but what depended on it and what changed. Better visibility shortens the time to those answers.
Security is no longer separate from monitoring. It is part of its core role. As exploitation speeds increase, organisations face a smaller window to respond. Monitoring helps detect early warning signs. The goal is not to replace security tools, but to reduce the time between change and detection. Tools only create outcomes when people know how to use them. Paessler invested in training and certification to build monitoring expertise. This reinforces practices such as full coverage, better alerting, useful dashboards, and automated reporting.
Paessler
www.paessler.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
