CEO's Blog

Monday, November 17 2008

Paessler's Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems

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.

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Thursday, November 13 2008

SNMP Tester Debug Tool Updated

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.

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Wednesday, November 12 2008

Creating Artificial NetFlow Data Streams for Testing Purposes Made Simple

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).

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Wednesday, November 12 2008

MIB Importer Tool Updated

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).

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Tuesday, November 11 2008

Packet Sniffing Debug Tool Updated

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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Tuesday, November 11 2008

Netflow Tester Debug Tool Updated

Paessler NetFlow Tester is a small program that simply dumps the data of all NetFlow packets that a computer receives from a Cisco router. This can be useful when debugging bandwidth monitoring configurations based on Cisco's NetFlow protocol, e.g. in order to find out whether packets actually reach the target system.

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Tuesday, November 04 2008

Using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to Run a Remote Probe for PRTG Network Monitor

Cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services recently announced support for hosting of Windows based servers on its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This new offering can now easily be used to create a cheap Remote Probe server for your own installation of PRTG Network Monitor!

To extended our own global network of probes (we use it as a demo website for visitors interested in PRTG and as a test platform for PRTG as well) we created a new remote probe running on EC2 in less than 30 minutes.

Here are the steps we took:

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