The latest version 6.2.1 of PRTG Traffic Grapher - which we have released today - contains some changes that will allow Windows Server 2008 to run PRTG 6. Previous versions of PRTG 6 often crashed on Windows 2008.
The two powersaving technologies for CPUs called Cool’n'Quiet (AMD) or Speedstep (Intel) can cause monitoring products like our PRTG and IPCheck to take incorrect measurements, especially when PRTG is run on a virtual machine on such a hardware.
When we ran PRTG 6 on a virtualized Windows XP machine running on VMWare server on an Ubuntu/Linux host we saw strange peaks of traffic and gaps in the graphs. After some investigation we found that the internal timers of the Windows machine sometimes slowed down (compared to real time) and ran faster later to catch up.
Thus the PRTG 6 monitoring station showed readings for the bandwidth measurements that were too high and too low (the counter deltas are divided by time to calculate the speed).
In order to run PRTG 6 (and other products that rely on exact timing) on such a virtualized machine it is necessary to
Generally it seems to be a good idea to disable the two technologies when using monitoring system, regardless of virtual or real system.
We recently had a customer who after having experienced multiple crashes while running PRTG under Windows Vista 64-Bit updated to version 6.2.0.907 only to notice that PRTG did not even start up properly but was crashing while in the process. Basically, his experience was that upon starting PRTG the “Loading…” screen would show up for a couple of seconds and the program would crash almost immediately, triggering the typical “solution search” window well known to Vista users.
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.
We have published a new release of version of PRTG Traffic Grapher. For V6.2 our developers have recently worked on PRTG’s SNMP engine and optimized it heavily. It can now query more SNMP values in less time and with less network load. Especially for installations with some hundred sensors or more (and for installations with small intervals, e.g. below 10 seconds) this new version requires less CPU load and causes less network traffic while showing better performance.
Learn more about this new version in the version history or visit the download page.
You do not need a Windows based computer (and a Windows license) to use most of PRTG’s features. You can also run PRTG Traffic Grapher 6.x on Linux. Using the “Wine Library” (which emulates Windows system calls) you can run PRTG like most other Windows apps on Linux systems. Of course some hardware/driver-based features like Packet Sniffing do not work.
For this tutorial the following steps will
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.
Some customers have had issues with installations of SNMP Helper Pro when the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) feature of Windows 2003 server was enabled. Also in some situations the packet sniffer feature of PRTG has shown problems with DEP enabled.
PRTG allows administrators to discern actual bandwidth usage in their network based on multiple parameters, such as IP addresses, port numbers, protocols, etc., using either packet sniffing or NetFlow collector sensors. A new article in our knowledgebase explains how this feature can be used to find out who (or what PC/Server) is causing traffic peaks and excessive bandwidth usage in a network.
When creating “Custom SNMP Sensors” in PRTG Traffic Grapher you need to choose between a “Delta counter (difference per period)” and a “Gauge counter (absolute value)”. Sometimes you may want to change this setting later.
Our latest knowledgebase article explains how to do it.