CEO's Blog

Tuesday, September 30 2008

Command Line Parameters and Exit Codes for Paessler Setups

The setup routines of Paessler products all have a number of command line parameters that will help to use them for automated software distribution. The knowledge base article
Command Line Parameters and Exit Codes for Paessler Setups has more.

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Thursday, March 20 2008

Internet Explorer Script Error When Running IPCheck's WinGUI

If you encounter an Internet Explorer script errors when launching or using IPCheck's WinGUI, please check in the Administrator Control Panel (under Windows' START menu, in IPCheck's program group) whether the DNS entry / IP address provided under the "System" tab matches the information provided in the WinGUI login information.

Make certain to use exactly the same data provided: i.e. if using an IP address in the Administrator Control Panel, make sure that the server login parameter provided in the WinGUI is also the IP address. In case the Admin Control Panel contains a DNS entry, provide the same for the WinGUI.

Note: please also make sure to provide the port number unless using the default value of port 80.

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Monday, February 11 2008

Error 80041010 'Invalid Class' messages while working with WMI

When working with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and experiencing problems with the error code "80041010" and the message "Invalid Class", usually the problem is caused by some required WMI classes that are not properly registered in the Windows system. The solution is to (re-)register all the WMI classes.

Read our latest knowledgebase article What to do when getting the 'Code Error 80041010 - Invalid Class' error while creating or using WMI sensors for more details.

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Thursday, January 31 2008

New version of IPCheck Server Monitor introduces a few bugfixes

The latest version 5.4.1.863/864 of IPCheck Server Monitor includes four minor bugfixes (support for 64bit WMI sensors, among others) as well as an optimized dump of monitoring data to the disk (makes sure that even for installations with many sensors the sensor intervals are not delayed by data dumping). Find out more about the other changes in the IPCheck version history.

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Monday, January 21 2008

Why we do not recommend installing software via Remote Desktop

In order to avoid installation and configuration issues, it is generally better to install PRTG and IPCheck directly on the host server, seeing as certain system pop-ups are not properly carried forward when connecting to the server via a RDP session.

Read more in our Knowledge Base Article.

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Monday, December 10 2007

Monitoring Macintosh Computers under Leopard using SNMP

As of the new Apple operating system Leopard, Macintosh users are able to monitor their resources and their hardware based on SNMP. John Welch has posted an article explaining the implementation and functionality of this newly included SNMP system at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. You can find the article under http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12/05/john-welchs-guide-to-snmp-on-leopard. SNMP is one of the ways to monitor your systems with both our flagship software products, PRTG and IPCheck.

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Friday, October 19 2007

Handy SNMP resources on the Cisco website: Cisco MIB Listings, MIB Locator, and OID Translator

Recently we came across the following three pretty notable pages provided by Cisco, allowing users to find Cisco MIBs and to discern OID segment almost at a glance.

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Thursday, October 11 2007

New version of IPCheck Server Monitor has been released

Version 5.4.1.855 of IPCheck Server Monitor includes some changes and enhancements for SQL and System sensors and a bugfix for WMI sensors.

See the history for details and download this latest version.

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Wednesday, October 10 2007

New diagnostic tool: Paessler WMI Tester

WMI ("Windows Management Instrumentation") is Windows built-in monitoring and management technology (introduced with Windows 2000). It's a great way to monitor Windows systems in your network.

IPCheck Server Monitor already works with WMI. As accessing WMI counters over a network is not exactly trivial, our new Paessler WMI Tester is a tool that can be used to test the accessibility of WMI counters in a quick and easy manner.

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Monday, September 10 2007

Monitoring the thread count of active processes via WMI Query sensors and IPCheck

Since introducing WMI sensors to IPCheck with version 5.4.1.834/835 we have received multiple queries on how to monitor processes using WMI Query sensors. Doing so is actually quite simple.

Read more in the Knowledge Base article about "Monitoring the thread count of active processes via WMI Query sensors"

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Friday, September 07 2007

External WMI access on Windows Vista rendered dysfunctional by NOD32 Anti Virus

The other day we found a Vista machine in our network that we could not remotely monitor from the LAN using WMI. But WMI monitoring was working fine on all our other Vista machines...

Finally we discovered that on the specific machine the NOD32 anti virus software was causing the same problems for WMI as we had already seen for SNMP (see my post from July 5th about dysfunctional SNMP on Vista).

As soon as we applied the procedure described in the article from July everything was fine for WMI.

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Wednesday, August 29 2007

Negative PING times on AMD Dual Core Processors - Solved

In recent weeks we have received reports about negative PING time measurements (e.g. -5 ms) from users of our monitoring products. "Great", we thought, "our software has overcome the laws the physics and is able to received network packets before they are actually sent". But now there are more and more hints showing up around the Internet that we will not receive the Nobel price in physics...

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Monday, August 20 2007

New Version 5.4.1 of IPCheck Server Monitor adds WMI Sensors and Vista Support

Today we have released the latest version 5.4.1 of IPCheck Server Monitor. The main new feature is support for five new sensors based on WMI

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Friday, August 10 2007

Taylor Wessing Monitors its Infrastructure Using IPCheck Server Monitor

European law company Taylor Wessing chose IPCheck Server Monitor after looking closely at the market for monitoring tools. They looked at monitoring companies that charged anything from £12,000 a year just to monitor email up to £120,000 for across the board monitoring. Neither were options. He also considered HP Open View but, due to the length of time required to train personnel on the product and, thereafter, the potential high staff turnover they dismissed it.

Instead they looked for a product that was "simple but very powerful". The solution was found in Paessler's IPCheck Server Monitor.

Read more in our latest case study.

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Tuesday, July 10 2007

Latest IPCheck beta version adds WMI sensors and support for Vista

The latest beta for IPCheck Server Monitor version 5.4.1 mainly adds two new features: WMI sensors and Vista support.

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Friday, July 06 2007

How to set up audible notifications for PRTG and IPCheck using speech synthesis software

Using text-to-speech software in CUSTOM EXE notifications in IPCheck and PRTG you can listen to messages from both programs.

Our latest knowledgebase article shows how to use the software "2nd speech" in conjunction with PRTG and IPCheck.

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Wednesday, July 04 2007

GameData, Inc. keeps Counter-Strike community website up and running with Paessler PRTG and IPCheck

GameData, Inc. operates various gaming-related Websites such as Counter-Strike.com, a player community site for Counter-Strike, the popular team-based Half-Life online action game series. The game website is an important source of information, downloads and player forums for the gaming community.

They replaced their MRTG program with Paessler's PRTG Traffic Grapher. The team uses PRTG Traffic Grapher to monitor CPU on all of their servers, bandwidth, RAM and available hard drive space. Additionally, the GameData network team uses Paessler's IPCheck Server Monitor to keep a close watch on server up time and to alert staff members when servers stop responding.

Read more in our latest case study

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Thursday, May 24 2007

MIB Importer converts proprietary device MIB-SNMP files to enable management by Paessler's Network Monitoring Applications

Today Paessler officially announced MIB Importer, a free software tool for existing Paessler customers that seamlessly converts proprietary network device Management Information Base (MIB) data into a format that is compatible with Paessler's PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor applications. This enables administrators to quickly and easily configure SNMP sensors for gathering critical network diagnostic information. By providing a hassle-free solution to monitoring, Paessler allows network administrators more time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Read more in our press release.

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Thursday, April 12 2007

A new version of IPCheck available

Today we have released a new version of IPCheck Server Monitor. This new release is mainly a maintenance version with 8 minor bugfixes, three changes and one new feature: Event Log Sensors can now scan event logs for specific 'Event IDs'.

Find out more about this new version on IPCheck's history page and download the new version.

Thanks to the customers that reported the bugs for their input!

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Monday, March 05 2007

New Guided Tour: An introduction to IPCheck Server Monitor

A new walkthrough for IPCheck Server Monitor was created by Patrick Hutter from the Paessler Support team and is now available on our website.

The guided tour demonstrates the first steps when creating a monitoring setup with IPCheck Server Monitor: Logging in, creating a group with a frist device and one sensor.

Watch the guided tour

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Wednesday, February 28 2007

Using phpSysInfo to monitor the system health of a PHP webserver

Using scripts from Open Source project phpSysInfo it is quite easy to set up a simple system-health monitoring on any webserver that can run PHP files. This feature can be monitored using IPCheck Server Monitor.

The trick is that phpSysInfo shows red bars as soon as the available memory, CPU resources or disk space fall below a certain threshold. These red bars are shown using GIFs images with the word "redbar" in their filename. Using an HTTP Advanced sensor we are monitoring that the resulting HTML from the script does not include the word "redbar". As long as this word is not included in the HTML the server works fine.

Read more in our Knowledge Base: Using phpSysInfo to monitor the system health of a PHP webserver with IPCheck Server Monitor

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Monday, February 19 2007

Changes in the Daylight Saving Time in the USA and their impact on IPCheck and PRTG

The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. by approximately four weeks. As a result, beginning in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier on March 11, 2007, and end one week later on November 4, 2007, resulting in a new DST period that is four weeks longer than previously observed.

If your computer runs on an American or Canadian Timezone setting this situation affects your computer and software.

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Thursday, February 15 2007

Instructions on how to set up Port Forwarding - on almost any router

PortForward.com offers help for setting up port forwarding on many routers or firewalls. Most users are not aware of how to configure their router or firewall in order to use IPCheck's Remote Probes in a remote network (or to offer access to PRTG's or IPCheck's webinterface from outside of the network).

The same applies to Peer-to-Peer file sharing (PtoP), Internet Games, Web serving, FTP serving, WebCams, IRC DDC, and Instant Messaging such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MS Messenger.

Quote:

Our Routers section offers detailed walkthroughs on how to setup port forwarding. These how to guides make it easy to setup your router or firewall for any application you may need.

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Friday, January 26 2007

Paessler MIB Importer updated to version 1.1

An updated version of our MIB Importer Tool is available on the website. With this software you can easily import MIB files and convert them into OID libraries for PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor.

In this latest version V1.1 we have improved the compatibility so that many "not-100%-RFC-conform" MIB files can now be loaded and converted (most in-the-wild MIB files are not conform to the RFCs...).

Visit the MIB Importer webpage

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Wednesday, January 24 2007

Setting up SQL Server Sensors for MS-SQL, MySQL and Oracle with IPCheck Server Monitor

Using the SQL Server sensors you can natively monitor the most used SQL servers: MySQL, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle SQL.

Basically, the sensors monitor whether the database server process

• A: accepts connections and
  
• B: processes requests and
  
• C: returns an expected result when executing a custom SQL command.

We have added a new article to our knowledgebase with detailed instructions for the setup of SQL sensors in IPCheck.

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Monday, January 08 2007

"This program has been damaged..." messages when starting Paessler programs

If you receive the message "This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive or a virus. Please reinstall it." when starting IPCheck Server Monitor, PRTG Traffic Grapher or Webserver Stress Tool then you either have a virus or trojan on your computer or a malfunctioning anti-spyware software.

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Wednesday, December 27 2006

Updating IPCheck Remote Probes Remotely

Since the remote probe software version needs to match the IPCheck host software version it is always necessary to update the probe's software each time the host's software is updated.

In order to automate the process and to update the software in such a manner that the actual users working on the target machines barely notice the process, the following steps can be taken for a "silent" install.

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Tuesday, December 05 2006

New beta version of IPCheck Server Monitor

We have published a new beta of IPCheck Server Monitor that adds a couple of new and interesting features.

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Friday, November 24 2006

Monitoring non-integer SNMP values with IPCheck Server Monitor

We have published a new article in our knowledge base that explains how you can use the Custom Script sensor of IPCheck Server Monitor to monitor non-integer values via SNMP.

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Friday, November 24 2006

Paessler MIB Importer V1.0 Beta

Now there is a brand new version of our MIB Importer Tool available on the website. With this software you can easily import MIB files and convert them into OID libraries for PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor.

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Thursday, October 12 2006

Minimizing diskspace usage for monitoring data by using NTFS built in compression

The monitoring databases of PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor can become quite large for installations with many sensors. E.g. we have a monitoring database of some 3 GB for one of our internal test installations.

To minimize actual disk space usage it is a good idea to enable the file system compression of the Windows operating system (available only on NTFS drives). This way the monitoring data is stored as compressed data on the disk and you save about two thirds of space.

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Monday, October 09 2006

IE7 Is Coming This Month... Paessler Products Are Ready!

IE7 will available later this month and in the coming weeks it will be installed automatically (!) on all Windows systems on the planet via the automatic update service.

Are you ready? At least your installations of Paessler software products are!

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Friday, August 25 2006

Directory Traversal Vulnerability Issue Fixed for IPCheck Server Monitor

We have published a new version of IPCheck Server Monitor that fixes a security issue in the webserver: By Using URLs with special characters a so-called "directory traversal" was possible. This fact could be exploited to gain access to files on the disk which IPCheck is installed on.

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Thursday, August 17 2006

Analyzing a Slow Exchange 2003 Server

You have been there: All servers seem to be getting slower over time. Always. But is it really the problem? Does it really hurt your business? And what can you do against it?

For Windows servers there are multiple reasons for a slowdown over time:

• fragmented disks
  
• overflowing TEMP folders
  
• processes that eat more and more RAM
  
• too many processes on a system or cpu-intensive processes
  
• hardware problems
  
• faulty software

Most of theses issues can be felt when working directly on the system (e.g. using Remote Desktop), but maybe they do not have an impact on the server services they provide.

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Wednesday, August 16 2006

Monitoring System Parameters like Memory, CPU and Disks on Linux Systems via SNMP

Every other day users of our monitoring products PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor ask us how they can monitor system parameters like CPU load, memory load, swap file size or disk usage on Linux and Unix systems.

Today we have published a new step-by-step article in our knowledgebase that explains how to set up system parameter monitoring for Linux systems.

This screenshot shows part of the list of available sensors for a Linux system (using IPCheck Server Monitor):

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Monday, August 14 2006

Using Multiple-Host-PINGs to monitor the performance of a WAN connection

The basic idea of this new custom sensor for IPCheck Server Monitor is that in many cases sending PINGs over a WAN connection to just one device is not a very reliable means of testing the connection. Every once and a while you will see dropped packets due to network overload, server trouble or whatever. On WAN connections you never know what happens between you and the server. Thus when monitoring just one distant system a number of lost PINGs don't tell you too much about the performance of the connection inbetween.

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Tuesday, August 08 2006

Installing the NET-SNMP daemon on Debian Linux

In order to monitor system parameters like memory and CPU load on Linux systems we recommend to install an SNMP daemon on the system. Then you can monitor the parameters using SNMP.

Today I found a tutorial on the debianhelp website that explains in detail how you can install the NET-SNMP service on a Debian Linux system. As soon as this service is installed and configured you can monitor system information like CPU load on a Linux system using PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor.

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Monday, July 31 2006

Remotely Monitoring Free Disk Space on Web Servers

IPCheck Server Monitor user R. Hesse asked our support team for a solution to monitor the free disk space on a remote server using a small PHP script. The problem is that if your webserver is located outside of your LAN it is usually not possible to monitor the free disk space using SNMP or Windows System Sensors due to firewalls and security restrictions.

But using a small PHP script we could supply our customer with a simple and quick solution to monitor the free diskspace on his remote web server. And this concept can easily be enhanced with more complex scripts.

Read more

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Thursday, July 20 2006

Changing the Storage Folder for IPCheck's Data

We have received this question a number of times in the past: How can I move the day-to-day data of IPCheck Server Monitor to a different folder or drive. Most users want to move the folder to a different drive because the monitoring database uses too much space on their C: drive, or they want the data to be in a folder that gets backed up everyday.

There is not GUI for this hidden feature, you must edit a registry key. See the
knowledgebase article for details.

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Tuesday, July 11 2006

Freeware and Standard Edition of IPCheck massively upgraded

Today IPCheck's lead developer Roland has released V5.3.2 of IPCheck Server Monitor which dramatically enhances the features available for the users of the Freeware Edition and the Standard Edition. These new enhancements give the Freeware a lot more value.

Until now Freeware and Standard users were limited to six basic sensor types, now they can use all sensor types that IPCheck Server Monitor offers. And we put even more on top: Instead of three sensors the Freeware users can now use up to five sensors.

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Tuesday, June 20 2006

New version of IPCheck changes behaviour of the sensor request scheduler

The new version 5.3.1.586 of IPCheck Server Monitor introduces some small changes to the request scheduler: now also latency timeouts are additionally used for sensor scheduling. This improves the use of latencies even more.

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Monday, June 12 2006

How does IPCheck process sensor notifications?

There is a new knowledgebase article that shows with two flowcharts how IPCheck processes events and how it decides what kind of action it takes, e.g. send out a notification in case of a sensor failure. Read more

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Friday, May 19 2006

Minor bugfix version of IPCheck released

There was a small bug which caused the probe selection setting for sensors to be invisible for Non-Admin users. IPCheck History

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Monday, May 15 2006

New IPCheck version fixes MS SQL sensor problems

The latest update for IPCheck Fixes MS SQL sensor problems with default database instances Download the latest version

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Wednesday, May 10 2006

Latest Update for IPCheck Server Monitor adds cool new features

With V 5.3.1 of IPCheck Server Monitor we have released a number of new features:

• You can now monitor SNMP in all three version (V1, V2C and V3)
  
• Latencies and notifications can be set for an account, for groups, for servers and for sensors: This makes it dramatically easier to manage large installations with many sensors
  
• Version 2.01 of the IPCheck Mobile GUI for Pocket PCs is now an integrated part of IPCheck Server Monitor

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