How We Created a Globally Distributed Monitoring System with PRTG for Less Than US$220/Month
Originally published on October 08, 2008 by Dirk Paessler
Last updated on March 03, 2022
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7 minute read
As a testbed and demonstration website for the "Remote Probe" feature of our monitoring software PRTG Network Monitor (and out of technical curiosity) we have set up a network of monitoring stations around the globe based on PRTG. To keep our costs low we have used virtual server offerings from grid hosting or VPS hosting companies for our remote probe installations. Virtual servers are much cheaper than dedicated offerings but provide only limited resources of course. In order to act as a remote probe for PRTG that only sends out a few monitoring requests into the Internet every few seconds a VPS is perfectly enough - in all cases we purchased the smallest Windows VPS offering available and saw decent results. PRTG's remote probes usually require little CPU cycles. We have to keep in mind that - due to bottlenecks caused by other VPSs on the same hosting system that may use a lot of CPU or bandwidth - the measured values will show a lot more jitter than they would on a dedicated system. For a long term perspective these fluctuations do not really matter. And they also do not matter for pure availability monitoring (even if the probe system has little CPU power, it will still find out whether a webserver can be reached or not). As a result we now have a network of 5 monitoring stations around the globe that are connected to one core instance of PRTG Network Monitor.
We used the following locations and hosting companies:
Location | Hosting Company | Monthly Cost (US$) | Reliability Rating |
San Francisco USA | GoGrid.com | $75 | ***** |
London UK | webhosting.co.uk | $43 | **** |
Edinburgh UK | FlexiScale.com | ($105) | * |
Cologne DE | HostEurope.de | $27 | ***** |
Singapore SG | usonyx.net | $75 | **** |
Nuremberg DE | Our own office datacenter | $0 |
- Amazon recently announced support for virtual Windows machines on its EC2 computing cloud, we will try that when it becomes publicly available.
- elastichosts.com in the UK has announced cloud computing based virtual servers starting at US$48 per month for a Windows server (but they have repeatedly postponed their public start)
Sample Graph 1: Live Map of Request Times of www.paessler.com
This map from PRTG shows graphs with recent measurements of HTTP requests to the homepage of www.paessler.com (located in Dallas, TX) reported by our probes in Cologne, Nuremberg, San Francisco, Singapore and Edinburgh.
Sample Graph 2: Historic Graph
The following report from PRTG shows graphs with the hourly averages for HTTP requests to the homepage of www.paessler.com (located in Dallas, TX) reported by our probes in Cologne, Nuremberg, San Francisco and Edinburgh during the month of September. It is interesting to see that despite the fact that all probes run on virtual systems, in the long run the measured values are quite constant. Regarding uptime measurements all probes have the same result of 100%. Click the image to zoom in!
Sample Graph 3: Live Data Tables of Request Times
Another sample is this public map from PRTG that shows the download times for some URLs on our servers from the different locations.