CEO's Blog

Today we have published updated version 2 of our WMI Tester Tool.

Since the release of PRTG Network Monitor 7, which can make massive use of WMI for monitoring in larger networks, we have seen quite a few customers having trouble with their WMI setups. These problems were caused by misconfigured firewalls, incorrect domain accounts, bad DCOM settings and many more. WMI Tester can be of a great help in such a situation - especially combined with our knowledgebase article “Paessler’s Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems“.

Listen to this eWeek podcast hosted by Mike Vizard where Mike and I talk about the toll virtualization is starting to take on our enterprise networks.

Thank You For Relying in Our Products

We deliver high quality network monitoring and web server stress testing software that helps our customers keep their network up and running.

But we could not do this without your support: purchasing our products, helping us to improve our software with your feedback, and recommending us to your friends and colleagues enables us to continuously improve our tools. Thank you.

We wish you happy holidays and a lucky and successful year 2009.

PS: The photos were taken on Germany’s most famous Christmas Market “Christkindlesmarkt” in our hometown of Nuremberg, Germany, just a 5 minutes walk from our offices.

Recently some users of our product Webserver Stress Tool found out that they could not perform any load tests anymore - but it had worked fine on their Vista computers before.
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We have uploaded a maintenance release of PRTG 7.0.9 that covers multiple smaller bugfixes, particularly covering a number of WMI issues. All of these bugfixes are based on feedback from users of PRTG and we want to thank everybody for mailing feedback and bug reports.

As you can see in the version history the bugs that we have fixed in this release mostly are quite specific issues which only showed on very few installations of PRTG 7. Nevertheless we recommend the upgrade to all users.

By the way: The number of installations of PRTG 7 is already above 25.000 and we are quite excited by this success!

The installation files for PRTG 7.0.9.2016 are available from the PRTG download webpage.

Every so often customers using our monitoring tools (e.g. PRTG Network Monitor) report issues when trying to monitor their systems using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) sensors. In most cases, these issues stem from a malfunctioning WMI configurations/installations.

Today we have published our Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems that will help users of PRTG to track down most issues.

Today we have uploaded a new version of SNMP Tester, our simple but efficient testing tool for SNMP connections. With SNMP Tester you can run simple SNMP requests against a device in your network.

The program is based on the SNMP technologies that are also built into PRTG Network Monitor and the idea is to have a tool that enables the user to debug SNMP activities in order to find communication and/or data problems in SNMP monitoring configurations. If the SNMP connection works with this test program it will also work with PRTG.

Our latest freeware tool Netflow Generator creates artificial NetFlow Version 5 data streams without the need for NetFlow compatible hardware. It is the perfect tool to test the NetFlow functionality of PRTG or other NetFlow compatible programs.

NetFlow Generator runs on a PC and sends NetFlow 5 Packets (via UDP) to a specific target computer which processes the data. You can create various patterns and loads of traffic. While the simulator is active it will create NetFlow packets which contain information about the selected traffic pattern. These packets contain the same information as a router/switch would send if it saw the simulated traffic pattern (the simulated traffic itself is not generated).

Today we have released a new version of our MIB Importer Tool. The MIB Importer is used to convert so-called “SNMP MIB files” into a format suitable for our monitoring applications, especially PRTG Network Monitor. MIB files are usually supplied by device vendors and describe the available monitoring objects of a device.

This new version 2.0 includes support for PRTG Network Monitor 7 and includes many improvements of the MIB parser aimed at improving compatibility with MIB files that only conform loosely to the RFCs (which happens quite often actually).

Our Card Packet Counter is a small tool that shows live stats and a short term statistical history about the network data packets and streams passing a local network card. Using the Packet Sniffing Engine of PRTG Network Monitor it looks at all network packets that pass a specific network card.

It was mainly developed to debug technical issues between PCs and the packet sniffing engine which is built into PRTG Network Monitor. But it is also a very useful tool for other network problem finding situations - and it’s free.

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