CEO's Blog

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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