CEO's Blog

Blog Entry of Tuesday, November 03 2009 in PRTG 7

PRTG Running On a Netbook Monitors the Complete Paessler LAN - Can Your Monitoring Software Do this?

Today I would like to talk about my favorite toy of recent weeks. I wanted to find the smallest PC in our company that is still able to monitor our complete production LAN network. So I wandered around the office and the slowest PC that I could find was our netbook, a DELL Inspiron Mini 10. Would this tiny PC be able to monitor a thousand sensors with PRTG?

The Test Platform: DELL Inspiron Mini 10

The DELL Inspiron Mini 10 is powered by an Atom CPU (Intel ATOM Z520 Processor @ 1.33 Ghz) with 1 GB RAM and runs Windows XP. How slow is it...? It is slow (compared to a modern PC or notebook). It is not even a decent performer for simple tasks like web surfing using Firefox or Chrome.

PRTG on the Netbook

So I installed the latest production version of PRTG - no problems. I started the network auto-discovery for our office LAN subnet which created 75 devices with 1430 sensors - and again, no problems. It is now monitoring our interval infrastructure - and has been for 4 weeks. Without any problems.

PRTG is successfully monitoring 1430 sensors with a 5 minute interval on this netbook - including 600 SNMP sensors and 600 WMI sensors. The CPU load is constantly at 20%-21%. 200 MB of the built-in 1 GB RAM is permanently available.

How can this be possible?

Well, we have in fact created PRTG to run with very little resources! In order to make PRTG scalable for large installations with thousands of sensors we have made a few important decisions during the creation of PRTG. The following aspects also help a smaller configuration on slow hardware:

• We did not choose to store our monitoring data in a SQL server like MS SQL Server or SQL Express. SQL servers require a lot of CPU power for themselves (and they would add many Megabytes to the PRTG download, too)
• Instead we took the more complex route: We created our own monitoring database system from scratch which takes advantage of two unique characteristics of monitoring data: All data is strictly chronological and the record size is constant. Both aspects made it possible to create a really fast database system. We ran performance tests for monitoring data storage in our database system against a MS-SQL server and found that our system is up to 100 times faster for some actions.
• PRTG's core server integrates data storage, object management and web server in one process. This avoids performance intensive communication between all these parts.
• PRTG's probes perform the actual monitoring independently from the core server. So processes in the core server can not slow down the monitoring performance.

Here is a photo of our netbook with PRTG monitoring 1430 sensors.