Paessler Blog
Archive for "2011"
2011-Dec-20
PRTG Tested by Monitoring Experts
Three very experienced software testers and journalists, all specialists on the network monitoring market, examined PRTG very carefully. The testers were excited in every respect and PRTG earned rave reviews.
2011-Dec-20
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 6: Know Your Costs
When monitoring and evaluating which failure tolerant setup is best for your needs, make sure you are aware of the costs. This is the final step and can also be very helpful when evaluating classic hosting vs. cloud hosting for your website or even your office IT.
2011-Dec-13
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 5: Monitor Your Network
Once you've set up backup and recovery plans, make sure you know about the status of all of your systems: Your IT infrastructure including all crucial hardware components, your network connections, as well as your servers.
2011-Dec-13
Sneak Preview: PRTG’s New Device Tree Views
Today, you can already choose from four views that show your configuration in different scales, from very compact (less data) to very detailed. If you've been missing views which concentrate more on the overall status overview of your network, we have something for you!
2011-Dec- 6
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 4: Have Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans
Your IT infrastructure is secured? Good. But what about your data backup? And are there any plans in case of a business emergency?
2011-Dec- 2
Beautiful Testing
If monitoring software is your business, there is one thing you cannot have enough of: Test systems running all over your network, under many different platforms, and on different hardware configurations.
2011-Nov-29
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 3: Set Up Redundancy and Auto-Healing for Your IT Infrastructure
If you made sure that your website is permanently online, you should also provide redundant systems for your office and back office IT.
2011-Nov-22
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 2: Set Up Redundancy and Auto-Healing for Your Website
Providing redundancies is essential. If technically possible we always try to set up "auto-healing" mechanisms which kick in immediately whenever a failure happens.
2011-Nov-21
iPRTG 3.0 is Available Now!
iPRTG is the app that makes mobile use of PRTG really simple. It can be installed on the iPhone, iPad, iPad 2, and iPod touch (iOS 4.0 or later). The app polls data from the PRTG server and displays it the ‘iphonic' way-with the look and feel that you're accustomed to on your Apple device.
2011-Nov-15
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business in Six Steps—Step 1: Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
Thing number one is to have a website that's online and working (and to make it really fast). Many younger companies seem to head straight for the cloud, mainly to market leader Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. We don't.
2011-Sep-23
What’s Cool in PRTG 9—
The CEO's Personal Top 10
Last week we had a short internal session to celebrate version 9 of PRTG. During the session, I showed the following slides with my personal 'Top 10' list of the nicest, new features and changes between PRTG 8 and PRTG 9. Many of them are not part of the official "What's new" list because they include more subtle changes which cannot be considered a real "feature".
2011-Sep- 7
Moving to a New Office in 100 Seconds
Have a look at this video, showing how we moved our office last weekend.
2011-Sep- 6
Release Candidate 1 of PRTG 9 is Available
If you have been following this blog recently you may have realized that we have been busy, here at Paessler, for the last weeks. Not only did we move to a new office last weekend, today we are also publishing the Release Candidate 1 of PRTG 9.
2011-Sep- 5
We were Moving: at 67 Gigabit per Second
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996).
Computer Networks.
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
2011-Sep- 1
This Weekend: Limited Sales and Technical Support
Since we will be busy moving into our new office over this weekend, you may experience some delays in our support and sales response times if you try to contact us between Friday Sept. 2nd, 2011 and Monday Sept. 5th, 2011.
2011-Sep- 1
Paessler is Moving—Again!
For the fourth time in ten years, we moved our office. We don't enjoy moving so much, we simply need more room. Again.
Our new postal address:
Paessler AG
Bucher Str. 79a
90419 Nuernberg
Germany
2011-Aug-29
Introducing PRTG 9 Features: Sneak a Peek at CEO's Whiteboard
Today I want to share a photo from my office with you. It shows my whiteboard covered with our wish list of all the new features for PRTG version 9.
2011-Aug-23
Introducing PRTG 9 Features: Round Trip QoS Monitoring
While the Beta phase of PRTG 9 is still running, we will introduce some of the great new features here. Today we will show you a new way how PRTG can monitor a network segment's Quality of Service using the new "QoS Round Trip" sensor.
2011-Aug-23
Introducing PRTG 9 Features: Sensor Selection and New Sensor Types
While the Beta phase of PRTG 9 is still running, we will introduce some of the great new features here. Today it's all about sensors: New sensor selection, new sensor types, and new functionalities within existing sensor types.
2011-Aug-18
Introducing PRTG 9 Features: Libraries
Customers frequently asked us for a feature allowing alternative views of the device tree, as well as further easy filtering options available directly from the device tree. We listened to the community and created an entirely new feature: the "Libraries". This new function is available from the main menu.
2011-Aug-18
Vote for PRTG Now!
Our network monitoring solution PRTG is nominated in the category "Best Network Management Product" for the 2011 Windows IT Pro Community Choice Awards.
2011-Aug-16
Introducing PRTG 9 Features: Tree View and Filtering
While the Beta phase of PRTG 9 is still running, we will introduce some of the great new features here. Today we want to talk about the web interface.
2011-Aug- 9
PRTG 9 Beta—Test It Now!
We're excited to announce the official public Beta testing period starting as of today! With PRTG version 9, we introduce a lot of new features that will bring network monitoring to a new level.
2011-Jul-12
See PRTG in Action
We are showing the latest edition of our award-winning PRTG Network Monitor version 8.4 during Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas. Cisco Live is the leading education and training event for IT, networking, and communications professionals. During the event, we offer live demos at Booth #649 in the World of Solutions Expo at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
2011-Jun- 8
Paessler Monitors World IPv6 Day Websites
On the "World IPv6 Day", June 8th, some of the biggest sites on the Internet, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, are enabling their web servers for IPv6 at the same time.
2011-Jun- 1
Paessler’s PRTG is Now Even Stronger in Monitoring of Virtual Environments
Our network monitoring software, PRTG includes 10 different sensor types specifically designed to monitor virtual systems and can provide information about the requirements for future virtual systems.
2011-May-13
15 Website Performance Indicators You Should Monitor
Network Monitoring Tools such as PRTG allow you to constantly keep track of your websites. However, sometimes it can be daunting to know what to monitor.
2011-May- 6
PRTG in the Press
Nicholas Mukhar from MSPmentor had a look at version 8.4 of our network monitor software:
"Paessler Launches PRTG Network Monitoring 8.4 for MSPs"
2011-May- 2
PRTG Now Supporting Pingdom Integration
With PRTG version 8.4, we present a new sensor type which can integrate Pingdom "checks" into your central network monitoring.
2011-Apr-26
Product Review Paessler PRTG Network Monitor 8.3
Dave Mitchell for Network Computing UK
"Don't be fooled by the low price as PRTG Network Monitor is a sophisticated product that's easy to deploy and quite capable of putting you in control. Network monitoring simply doesn't get any easier or more affordable than this."
2011-Apr-18
Rewrite of PRTG’s Map Editor—Now Supporting Drag & Drop
With PRTG version 8.4 (download) we're excited to introduce a complete rewrite of the Map Editor allowing to create maps in your browser in even more straightforward manner! It has never been easier: Simply select an object and drop it directly onto the map!
2011-Apr-12
Hosting a Website Through Amazon CloudFront
In yesterday's post I mentioned that we are now hosting our corporate website through the Amazon Cloudfront content delivery network (CDN). Today I would like to share some observations we made while creating our new setup.
2011-Apr-12
Paessler Has a New Website—Now Fully CDN-Hosted
You may have already noticed our new look: Last week we launched our new website for www.paessler.com. This re-launch brought a new design to our homepage and we also migrated to a new hosting concept.
2011-Apr- 6
Monitoring Networks On-the-Go with New PRTGdroid App
Paessler releases its first Android app which connects to your PRTG Network Monitor; makes network monitoring faster and more convenient
2011-Mar-28
Find Out Which Cloud Provider Serves You Fastest
We have developed a "CDN Performance Test suite" for CloudClimate.com to compare 12 selected CDN hosting companies, plus 12 cloud servers running on public clouds.
2011-Mar-28
Page Load Times of PRTG for Large Installations
We recently conducted a series of performance tests of PRTG's web interface using the built-in web page speedtest.
The following results compare the performance of Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 on the same hardware for installations with 1000, 5000, 10,000, and 20,000 sensors. Additionally we wanted to measure the effects of the "Speed Mode" switch.
2011-Mar-27
Measure the Page Load Times of Your PRTG Installation
We recently added a hidden and experimental feature that allows you to measure the page load times of your PRTG installation (it was added in version 8.3). These measurements can be quite helpful when you try to optimize your server for optimal speed. You simply run the test, make a note of the measurements, then reconfigure your server and re-run the test to get a comparative measurement.
2011-Mar-27
How to Lower Web Page Load Times of PRTG by 80%-90% in 4 Easy Steps
According to Jacob Nielsen, the usability guru for web based applications, the page load time of websites should stay below 1 second to make a website "feel fast" (see: Response Times: The 3 Important Limits, an excerpt of his book "Usability Engineering").
Of course this rule also applies to PRTG's web interface. As long as you stay below 1,000-2,000 sensors you will get page load times below 1 second on most systems. Even our super-slow netbook test installation of PRTG with 1,400 sensors (running on an Atom based DELL Inspirion Mini netbook) achieves an average page load time below 500ms.
But when your PRTG installation has several thousand sensors you can run into slow page loads even when PRTG runs on high performance hardware. Some pages of the web interface are especially problematic as far as this is concerned: Unfiltered sensor lists, log data tables, top 10 lists.
It is completely normal that a PRTG installation becomes slower with an increasing number of sensors, in fact page load times are becoming linearly slower with the number of sensors. But there are still various things that you can do to speed up PRTG. In this blog article I want to compile a list of actions you can take!
2011-Mar-24
Freeware Android App "PRTGdroid" V1.0 Released
We are happy to introduce the first version of PRTGdroid, the Android app that connects to your PRTG installation. This new app is available in the Android Market as of today and enables Android users to monitor their PRTG installation while on the go. We offer this first version for free!
2011-Mar-17
NetFlow, sFlow and jFlow With Every License
Our network monitoring software monitors bandwidth usage on most common Juniper, Cisco and HP hardware as PRTG includes jFlow, NetFlow and sFlow sensors.
By the way:
Try the new “sFlow Tester” to analyze and debug sFlow monitoring setups.
2011-Mar-10
PRTG Freeware With All In
Even the 10 sensors freeware version of our network monitoring software offers the entire feature set of the commercial editions.
Including:
- NetFlow/sFlow/jFlow
- Failover Cluster
- Remote Probes
- etc.
2011-Mar- 8
Revisited: Monitoring CDN Services and Cloud Servers Using a Globally Distributed PRTG Cluster (March 2011)
One of our test and demo websites for PRTG is a 5-way cluster which has cluster nodes in California, Texas, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. We use this cluster to monitor a selected set of cloud servers and CDN services for uptime and request times. See my blog post from January for more technical details about the setup.
In January we found that CacheFly CDN and Google AppEngine followed by CloudFront, Rackspace Cloudfiles and SoftlayerCDN were the best performers. Did these 5 continue to outperform the others? Let us look at the data from the last 30 days!
2011-Mar- 2
sFlow Tester: A New Testing Tool from Paessler (Freeware)
Today we released a new free testing tool for system administrators, the “sFlow Tester” which helps to analyze and debug sFlow monitoring setups. This freeware tool accepts sFlow data packets (which are usually sent by switches/routers) and displays data about it. It helps you to test the configuration of your sFlow capable routers.
Just configure a sFlow device to send data to the computer running the sFlow tester, and you can see the received packets including all important property information, such as sFlow version, IP source and version, sample and data format, or Ethernet and protocol type.
2011-Feb-16
New Languages
With version 8.3 our network monitoring software PRTG now supports English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese out of the box.
2011-Feb-15
PRTG Advances Beyond 100 Types of Sensors
With version 8.3 our software, PRTG Network Monitor, now offers more than one hundred different sensor types. A total number of 112 different types of sensors enable users to monitor their networks and servers with an impressive depth. The new sensor types are:
2011-Feb-15
Upgrade PRTG: 20 Sensors For Free
Place a "Monitored by PRTG" banner on your homepage and link to our website.
We will send you a license key that increases your freeware installation from 10 to 20 sensors for free!
2011-Jan-31
Billing Tool for PRTG Released as Open Source Project
Hosting companies and Managed Service Providers (MSP) not only use PRTG to monitor their networks but also to measure their clients' resource and bandwidth usage. Finally, at the end of the month, the data is used for billing purposes. There are many good reasons to build a billing component that can send invoices to customers from PRTG. But there is a major obstacle: We found that we got at least 8 different answers when we asked 10 PRTG users how they would want their billing system to work. Every billing method looks and works differently. It was obvious that we would not be able to develop a solution that would fit all needs. So we chose a different approach: We created a billing tool that can be customized by the user in every aspect imaginable: It includes a scripting interface for smaller alterations and we will also release the sources (C#/.NET) for those users that need even more flexibility. Today we are excited to announce the stand-alone billing tool application for PRTG. It is able to retrieve monitoring data through PRTG's built-in API and generate variable billing reports in the PDF format.
2011-Jan-20
Monitoring CDN Services and Cloud Servers Using a Globally Distributed PRTG Cluster
One of our test and demo websites for PRTG is a 5-way cluster which has cluster nodes in California, Texas, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. With this cluster we are continuously monitoring 20 URLs of cloud servers and CDN services (one monitoring request every 5 minutes from each cluster node). Today I would like to share some of our results from the last 30 days.The PRTG Cluster
All measurements shown below were created using a 5-way cluster of our software PRTG Network Monitor.
The 5 cluster nodes are running on:
2011-Jan-17
PRTG 8.2 Released
After weeks of feature programming and implementing new ideas, we released a new version of PRTG. Since the final release of PRTG 8 in September, we have already added many extensions and fixes. With this new release, we additionally introduce a new database format, a massive upgrade to the auto-discovery and device template systems, new sensor types, and many other improvements. The new database can access log files, ToDos, and Toplists up to 300 times faster than previous versions. The new auto-discovery functionalities include template support for almost all devices, as well as a new way to define IP ranges for discovery. There are also three new sensor types: You can now check DHCP servers, monitor VMware disks via SSH, and monitor the traffic of Juniper jFlow-capable devices.2011-Jan-10
Meet Us at Cisco live 2011 in London
We will show our network monitoring software PRTG at Cisco's annual European conference.
- January 30 to
February 3, 2011 - Booth E88
- ICC, London