CEO's Blog

Today we have opened up our PRTG DEMO installation using our global probe network for public access. Now visitors can access the current monitoring status as well as maps and reports through a “read-only” user account (a new feature of PRTG V 7.0.9).

This PRTG installation uses five remote probes located around the globe (San Francisco CA, London UK, Cologne DE, Nuremberg DE, Singapore SG) and monitors our own servers (including our webservers, 3 firewalls, and our mail server).

Simply go to http://prtg.paessler.com and click on “Login”.

Finally the latest upgrade for users of PRTG Network Monitor is available. And this upgrade is a worthwhile one! More than 200 changes and improvements along with a number of bugfixes have been built into the product.

The most important changes are:

• Support for all major browsers: Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, IE 7/8 and Google Chrome
• Massive reporting improvements: Better layout, easier sensor selection, better time span selection, etc.
• Improved web interface: Clone Group, folding of groups and devices, optional alarm sound in browser when errors occur - plus a broad optimization of all AJAX functions for more performance and reliability
• VMware Sensors: Support servers running VMware ESX Server or VMware Virtual Center
• “Read Only” User: Read only users can not see all the links to add, modify or delete objects
• New sensor types: File, Folder and Share Disk Space sensors
• Plus: Improved Maps, “change” detection, and much more

Please see our history of changes for a detailed list of new features, changes and bugfixes and visit the PRTG download page to get the installer files.

Many users of the freeware of PRTG Network Monitor use the software to simply monitor their Internet router and to find out how much bandwidth they consume in a month. The Linksys RVS 4000 is a good and common example and we will look at its details for this blog post. Many other Internet access routers will show quite similar behaviour.

If you let PRTG’s auto-discovery scan the router’s IP you will get the following sensors:

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As a testbed and demonstration website for the “Remote Probe” feature of our monitoring software PRTG Network Monitor (and out of technical curiosity) we have set up a network of monitoring stations around the globe based on PRTG.

To keep our costs low we have used virtual server offerings from grid hosting or VPS hosting companies for our remote probe installations. Virtual servers are much cheaper than dedicated offerings but provide only limited resources of course. In order to act as a remote probe for PRTG that only sends out a few monitoring requests into the Internet every few seconds a VPS is perfectly enough - in all cases we purchased the smallest Windows VPS offering available and saw decent results. PRTG’s remote probes usually require little CPU cycles.

We have to keep in mind that - due to bottlenecks caused by other VPSs on the same hosting system that may use a lot of CPU or bandwidth - the measured values will show a lot more jitter than they would on a dedicated system. For a long term perspective these fluctuations do not really matter. And they also do not matter for pure availability monitoring (even if the probe system has little CPU power, it will still find out whether a webserver can be reached or not).

As a result we now have a network of 5 monitoring stations around the globe that are connected to one core instance of PRTG Network Monitor.

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With version 7.0.9 we are introducing specialized sensors for monitoring of VMware ESX servers. These sensors talk directly to the SOAP interface of ESX servers in order to monitor the system health of the host machine as well as the system health of each individual virtual machine.
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Our development team had quite a busy month in September. The result is the new version 7.0.9 of PRTG Network Monitor which includes more than 150 changes since version 7.0.8. Highlights are an improved web interface (including support for IE8, Chrome & Safari browsers), new sensors for VMware servers and an improved reporting engine.

Please see our history of changes for a detailed list of new features, changes and bugfixes.

V 7.0.9 is available as public beta. The release version is scheduled for Oct. 8th 2008.