Paessler Blog
Archive for "2010"
2010-Dec-22
PRTG Takes Part in Big RIPE Atlas Project
Creating a “weather map” showing the condition of the Internet all over the world is the declared goal of the Atlas project initiated by regional internet registry organization Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC). Located in the Netherlands, they aim to ship small hardware “probes” to all over the world. Volunteers on five continents are asked to plug in these small Ethernet devices into their personal or company’s network, building measuring points for “the last mile” of Internet access points in a large number of countries.
One of the subjects that should be investigated is the suitability of IPv6 in everyday use. As we all have to prepare for this, this project can be very important to all of us. According to Daniel Karrenberg from RIPE, these probes do not sniff any of the participants’ network traffic, but only perform measurements using Ping, DNS resolution via both IPv4 and IPv6, and trace route. RIPE already has longstanding experience in monitoring the traffic at Internet Service Providers, but the Atlas project will extend knowledge about the on and on growing Internet just into the homes. First—statistically unproven—monitoring results are already available.
2010-Nov-22
More Options to use iPhone Push Notifications with PRTG
iPhone Push Notifications are a fast and cost effective way to send alarms from your PRTG server to your iPhone/iPad. Due to Apple’s design of the push notification system we cannot easily implement our own push notification interface into PRTG or iPRTG. The main reason is that each PRTG user runs his own server which would need to sign up and authenticate with Apple’s servers and stay connected to them using a two-way connection (see KB article "Why is there no support for Push Notifications in PRTG and/or iPRTG?"). The whole setup would be quite complex. Fortunately there are a couple of apps for the iPhone that fill this gap. I already wrote about Prowl last year , which works fine but we heard from a couple of users that had trouble setting up the API calls between their PRTG and the Prowl servers. Recently I came across two other interesting options:2010-Nov-17
And The Winner Is...
During the beta testing phase of PRTG 8, many users tested our new software and contributed with useful hints and feature requests, and helped fixing bugs. It’s our user feedback that makes PRTG a strong and customer-oriented piece of software. Thank you to everybody who sent in feedback! Meanwhile, PRTG 8 is out and we’re very happy to get a lot of feedback from users who tell us they love it.
To say “thank you” to everybody who took part in the Beta test, we promised to raffle off a brand new iPad among the testers.
2010-Nov- 9
Consuming RESTful HTTP/XML APIs With a PRTG Sensor
With a new custom sensor (created by our friend Gerard Feijth) it is now possible to use data from REST-like APIs as sensor data in PRTG. The sensor requests data from an HTTP or HTTPS URL (using GET), parses the XML results and uses selected data from the XML as sensor value in PRTG. With this technique you can import data from many APIs into PRTG, as long as they are offering an interface that works with simple HTTP GETs and replies with XML data. Services like these are often called “REST APIs or RESTful APIs”. This type of API is becoming more and more common, PRTG's own API is a RESTful API, too. Here are a few samples what we can do with this sensor:2010-Nov- 3
Beta Testers Wanted: PRTG's Database for Logs, Todos and Toplists is Now 50-300 Times Faster
During the next weeks we will officially introduce a new database system for log entries, ToDos, and Toplists. The old system (based on SQLite) was sufficient for small to medium installations, but for installations with thousands of sensors it could cause performance bottlenecks. In the past weeks we have implemented a complete rewrite of this storage system. The new engine is up to 300 times faster when writing data and up to 100 times faster when reading data. Furthermore, the writing speed is not affected by the size of the database at all; you can now store a whole year of log data without affecting the performance—regardless of the size of your installation! This is a major breakthrough! You will be amazed at how fast log data is displayed in the web interface when browsing through the logs of the system (main menu item “Logs”) or when viewing logs of a single monitoring object.2010-Oct-27
Guess what! "Sensor" is Our Favorite Word
With PRTG 8, we have released the most extensive PRTG manual up to date. The PDF version now has more than 800 pages. It’s not that PRTG became more complicated, we just wanted to make sure that our users find instructions on how to perform all everyday tasks when working with our Network Monitor. For example, the new documentation contains details about every single sensor, every setting field, and provides many useful links to resources in our Knowledge Base.
Just out of curiosity, we created a “Wordle” for our new manual document. Wordle is an Internet based service, describing itself as “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’”. It counts the frequency of all words used in a given text and displays the result as a word cloud. Unsurprisingly, we as a monitoring company used the word “sensor” most, followed by “object,” “settings,” and “device”.
2010-Oct-17
iPRTG 2.1 Now Supports iPad Resolution and iPhone 4
iPRTG for PRTG is available in a brand new version. As a 'Universal App' it now supports iPhone, iPod, and even the iPad with its higher resolution.
iPRTG is the iPhone application for network monitoring while on the go. It enables you to quickly connect to your PRTG installation and review all monitoring results as well perform simple actions such as acknowledge alarms, pause and resume monitoring, add favorites, etc.
The new version is now available for download at iTunes store. If you have already purchased iPRTG, you can download the update for free.
2010-Oct-15
New Video Tutorials available!
The Paessler support team has created three video tutorials to make it even easier to start using our network monitoring software PRTG.
2010-Sep-29
New! PRTG 8
The new version 8 takes our network monitoring software to a new level:
8 New Features
8 Advantages
8 Licenses
2010-Sep-23
Showing up-to-date weather information, webcam images and radar images in PRTG's maps
If you are running a "dashboard" for your NOC, e.g. by using a big screen on the wall that displays PRTG monitoring information, you can also add webcam images, weather data, current radar maps and other external information. Here is a sample map which embeds various external sources with live data:
View sample map in full size
2010-Sep-22
Revisited: Don't Use Windows Vista And Windows 2008 R1 for Network Monitoring via WMI!
In June last year we published our test results for WMI monitoring performance for various combinations of Windows versions (Don't Use Windows Vista And Windows 2008 for Network Monitoring via WMI!). We found that Vista and Windows 2008 (release 1 at that time) were completely unsuitable to perform network monitoring using WMI. Our QA team recently repeated these tests, now including Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. And the results are still the same:2010-Sep-14
Introducing the New All-In License Model
With the release of PRTG 8, Paessler takes a revolutionary step and completely simplifies its licensing model. Using our new add-on-free software product PRTG 8 you monitor your network without worrying about paying extra money for additional features. Everything is included in one license because we are confident this makes your work easier. Simply choose an installation size for your setup and benefit from the new functionalities PRTG brings to your network.
2010-Sep- 9
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 5: New Sensor Types
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features! The release date of PRTG is coming closer! In addition to many new features already mentioned in earlier posts, the new version comes with a lot of new sensor types that enable you to monitor even more devices and services. Many of them arose from user requests. Today, we want to give you an overview of these new sensor types.2010-Sep- 2
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 5: A Little Slideshow
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features! In the last blog entries, a lot of new features have already been introduced. To give you an extensive insight into the new Ajax web interface, we've compiled a series of screenshots so you can directly dive into the new look & feel of PRTG.
2010-Aug-16
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 4: New Graph Types
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features!
One frequently requested feature was the possibility to show filled and stacked graphs. Here you go: With PRTG 8, we introduce an optional new appearance for our data graphs! You can now set graphs to be “filled” or “stacked”, and you can even display data using the positive/negative y-axis, which is quite handy for showing traffic in and traffic out in one graph.
The new graph types can be used when displaying live data as well as when generating reports. See some examples below. By the way, you can find the radio buttons to enable these features in the system settings and the sensor settings.
2010-Aug-10
Vintage Browsers and PRTG: Why We Do Not Support IE6/IE7 Any More
There is an obvious trend for application design nowadays: Everybody wants web based applications! They offer three big advantages: 1. web based applications only require a web browser on the end-users’ computers 2. usage is, in most cases, easy to learn 3. they can be centrally managed by the administrators We anticipated this trend in 2006 when we designed the architecture of PRTG 7 which completely relies on a web based user interface.2010-Aug- 4
News from the PRTG Community
Enabling its users to write their own custom sensors, PRTG offers a powerful option to extend existing network monitoring to make it even more convenient. Although PRTG offers out-of-the-box monitoring for a huge variety of devices and systems, sometimes system administrators have special requirements in very specific setups. These can be met using own script or EXE files that can be easily integrated in the central monitoring solution.Sensors at Google Code Project
At a Google Code Project Hosting website for PRTG7 Add-ons, users share their home-made scripts and EXE files that can be used as PRTG sensors. For example, one of our most active users, Gerard Feijth, released several custom sensors during the last months, all implementing features which users had asked for in the Paessler Knowledge Base:2010-Aug- 3
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 3: Introducing "The PRTG Cluster"
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features! With version 8, we introduce a completely new and up-to-date feature: PRTG’s failover clustering. It is included in all licenses and enables you to set up a fail-safe monitoring system with seamless data—no more data gaps when a system crashes or when you have to restart your server (not even a software upgrade of PRTG will stop monitoring). I want to give you a little insight into what our clustering does and how to configure it easily.Simple Failover Cluster
The most common setup is two PRTG servers running “side-by-side” in a single failover cluster. The first node is the Master Node and is responsible for the configuration, management, alerting, and reporting. If this PRTG instance should fail, e.g. due to a server crash or connectivity issues, the second node (i.e. the Failover Node) takes over the master role and continues the monitoring until the original Master Node is back online.
2010-Jul-27
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 2: New Native Linux and Mac OS Sensors
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features! Monitoring Linux systems was already possible in earlier versions of PRTG (an “SNMP daemon”, like net-snmp had to be installed on the machines). In version 8, PRTG now monitors Linux systems using dedicated sensors supporting Linux/Unix and also Mac OS X without the need to install or change anything on the target machines.
SSH, WBEM, or SNMP
Using the technologies SSH or WBEM, PRTG requests information about CPU load, memory status or hard disks directly from the systems. When SSH is used, the data is sent via a secure connection, ensuring you do not compromise the security of your systems while transferring monitoring data via the network.2010-Jul-22
New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 1: Enhanced Web Interface
While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features! For version 8, we have refurbished the web interface, making it even more intuitive and easy to use. The new interface reveals a cleaner look, has seen numerous improvements (many of them were suggested by PRTG users), integrates Google Maps, and displays helpful monitoring data information on mouse over, enabling the system administrator to gain an overview of his network even more quickly.A New Look and a New Sensor Status
Flat icons and a restructured interface define the web interface of PRTG 8, which remains the vital part for the usage of PRTG for all monitoring and configuration tasks. We have kept a lot of established and popular functionalities, such as the intelligent auto-folding function in the device tree view or the arrangement of sensor information in different tabs.
2010-Jul-13
The First Public Beta of PRTG 8 Is Here
Two years and 14 days ago, on June 30th 2008, we released the last new major version: version 7 of PRTG Network Monitor. Since then PRTG has seen numerous improvements, new features and enhancements. Now, the next major version is getting close to completion. With version 8 PRTG takes another big leap forward with hundreds of improvements and many new features.Clustering and More
With this new version we introduce a unique new feature that allows PRTG users to create fail-safe, distributed monitoring systems: The "PRTG Cluster" where up to 5 PRTG instances ("nodes") work together to create a fail-safe monitoring system.
We have implemented numerous new features:
2010-Jul- 1
PRTG Demos During Cisco Live 2010 - Booth 643
Network monitoring software PRTG delivers “10X the features for less than annual maintenance cost” of competing systems; slashes troubleshooting time and expense with 24/7 assurance for network availability.
2010-Jun-21
iPRTG 2 - The Personal Network Monitoring Assistant on Your iPhone
As of now, iPRTG 2 is available in the iTunes store! iPRTG is a personal network monitoring assistant for your PRTG Network Monitor software. Always with you on your iPhone, it allows to view the current status of your network on the go. Using iPRTG, you benefit from many interesting features—wherever you are:
2010-May-27
iPRTG in a Completely New Version - Beta Testers Wanted
Since last August users of the popular smartphone Apple iPhone can download and install a dedicated app that brings PRTG to their phone. We have received a lot of feedback and requests for enhancements. During the last months our partner company beyond content went back into their labs and actually rewrote the whole app from scratch! New development tools for the iPhone and some new API calls on behalf of PRTG's API allowed the developers to come up with an app that just blows you away! So today I am happy to announce the new version 2 of iPRTG.
2010-May-20
How to Use Google Font API for the Web Interface of PRTG Network Monitor
Yesterday Google have published their new "Google Fonts API" which enables webmasters to use a selection of attractive fonts for their websites. Usage of the service is free of charge. Using this API is a quick and straightforward way to individualize a PRTG installation. Here is a sample screenshot:
2010-May-17
"Real World" Performance Comparison of CDN (Content Delivery Network) Providers
Since February visitors of our website http://www.cloudclimate.com have the possibility to measure "website asset delivery speed" of 24 CDN and cloud providers using their own internet connection (see the blog post). The results for each user are stored in our database and we now have gathered the performance results of 340,000 requests. There is something special about our test: We have "real surfer" measurements for the 24 providers because we have actually used the "real world" Internet connections of our website visitors to run the test requests. Most CDN comparison tests that we have seen published on the Internet were created by using just a few measurement points, and often - to make things even more unrealistic - the measurements were taken out of professional data centers (which, in most cases, have high speed connectivity anyway). 24% of the tests were run from inside the USA, 9% each from Germany and the UK, the rest came from countries all over the world. So now it is time to dive into the data and draw some conclusions.2010-Apr-21
Top 5 Troubleshooting Tips for Your WMI Problems
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a mighty tool for system administrators to monitor and to manage a whole Windows network from one central point. It allows you to start processes, read the Event Log history or even send a command to reboot a system for all computers in your network. Unfortunately, using WMI can be tricky. In most cases security and user account related problems can cause trouble. Sometimes even more complex issues occur. Users of PRTG Network Monitor—which makes extensive use of WMI for Windows monitoring—often ask us for configuration help. We have compiled several documents to help them.2010-Apr-15
PRTG's Email Round Trip Sensor and Google Mail
Email round trip sensors ensure the end-to-end delivery of emails and make it possible to monitor availability and performance of a complete email delivery process. In order to test your own mail servers for delivery to external mail accounts, you need a third party mail account on the Internet. Our experience is that round trip monitoring works very well with Google Mail, as it operates reliably and there are virtually no downtimes on Google's side (which means practically no false alarms).2010-Mar-30
PRTG Network Monitor Gets a Massive Performance Boost for Large Installations
With the just-released version 7.3.3 of PRTG we are introducing significant improvements for PRTG's built-in web server. Especially for large installations with thousands of sensors, the user experience of both Windows and web interface will be noticeably faster. In our lab, we run installations of PRTG with 10,000 and 20,000 sensors. The 20,000 sensor installation, for example, runs on a water-cooled PC (Alienware) with a Core-2-Quad CPU at 2.66 GHz, i.e. quite a powerful machine. But with PRTG 7.3.2 most web pages took 5 - 10 seconds to generate. Some even took 30 - 50 seconds. We thought that's too slow. So we got our hands dirty, found a few things that needed to be changed and – wow! – with PRTG 7.3.3 all pages are being delivered in one second or less.2010-Mar-18
First results: Which CDN Provider serves you fastest?
10 days ago I have announced our globally distributed CDN speed test on this blog. At CloudClimate.com we have developed a CDN Performance Test suite that Internet users can run over your their personal Internet connection. The test performs ten downloads of a 64 Kbyte image from 12 selected CDN hosting companies plus 12 cloud servers running in public clouds around the globe. Thanks to all users who have visited the webpage in the mean time. We now have logged the results from 66.000 test requests in our database and I can go ahead and publish our first results.2010-Mar- 8
Big CDN Provider Test: Who Serves You Fastest?
Nowadays, state of the art websites use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to deliver static websites assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files. In order to deliver these objects as fast as possible to the website visitor, the CDN providers run a network of so called "edge servers" in multiple locations. As soon as your browser requests a website object, its connection is directed to the nearest server (in a network topological view) which finally delivers the data. This sounds great in theory, but in real life it can be a complex task. One aspect is running an edge server network around the world (largest provider Akamai reports more than 40,000 servers around the globe). And there is "the last mile" issue: Website visitors usually do not sit in data centers with fiber optic connections, but use cable, DSL, T1, etc. instead. With a broadly conceived test, we want to find out:2010-Mar- 1
Paessler Launches New Knowledge Base
Last week, Paessler's new Knowledge Base went online. There, you can find a compilation of resources about network monitoring in general and – of course – support and know-how information about PRTG Network Monitor and our other software products. As a mixture of Knowledge Base and forum, users cannot only receive information, but they can interactively ask questions and even share their knowledge by answering questions themselves. To become a contributor, you simply have to sign-up once and log in.2010-Jan-11