CEO's Blog

Wednesday, October 22 2008

Visit the Public Demo of PRTG Network Monitor

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".

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Tuesday, October 21 2008

New Version Released: PRTG Network Monitor 7.0.9

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.

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Thursday, October 16 2008

Monitoring your Internet Bandwidth Usage with a LinkSys RVS 4000 Router and PRTG Network Monitor

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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Tuesday, October 14 2008

Surftip: viversum offers counceling in Germany

A new customer that uses PRTG Network Monitor to ensure uptime of their servers is viversum GmbH:

Die Expertinnen und Experten von viversum helfen Dir in ausweglos scheinenden Situationen ebenso wie beim Blick in Deine ganz persönliche Zukunft. In einem völlig unverbindlichen Gratisgespräch kannst Du Dich ohne Kosten von der Qualität der Beratung überzeugen. Spreche Deine Fragen und Krisen, etwa in den Bereichen Liebe, Partnerschaft, Beruf und Familie an - es gibt eine Lösung. Rund um die Uhr bieten Dir unsere erfahrenen Berater im einfühlsamen Dialog kompetente Lebensberatung und Zukunftsdeutung, u.a. durch Kartenlegen (z.B. Tarot), Hellsehen und Wahrsagen - nutze diese Chance!

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Thursday, October 09 2008

How We Created a Globally Distributed Monitoring System with PRTG for Less Than US$220/Month

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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Sunday, October 05 2008

Surftip: Looking for a lawyer in Germany?

One of our customers next door here in Nurmberg is anwalt.de AG, a company that helps to find a lawyer in Germany:

www.anwalt.de - Bei anwalt.de finden Sie den passenden Rechtsanwalt vor Ort für jedes private oder berufliche Rechtsproblem. Zahlreiche Suchmöglichkeiten sowie umfangreiche Kompetenz- und Erfahrungsprofile jedes Rechtsanwalts machen die Recherche einfach und zielsicher. Außerdem finden Sie bei anwalt.de telefonische sowie Online-Rechtsberatung.

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Wednesday, October 01 2008

Monitoring System Parameters of VMware ESX Servers Hosts and Virtual Machines

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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Wednesday, October 01 2008

PRTG Network Monitor 7.0.9: Feature Bonanza

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.

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