CEO's Blog
Archive for the 'PRTG 6' Category
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Wednesday, November 12 2008
Creating Artificial NetFlow Data Streams for Testing Purposes Made Simple
Our latest freeware tool Netflow Generator creates artificial NetFlow Version 5 data streams without the need for NetFlow compatible hardware. It is the perfect tool to test the NetFlow functionality of PRTG or other NetFlow compatible programs.
NetFlow Generator runs on a PC and sends NetFlow 5 Packets (via UDP) to a specific target computer which processes the data. You can create various patterns and loads of traffic. While the simulator is active it will create NetFlow packets which contain information about the selected traffic pattern. These packets contain the same information as a router/switch would send if it saw the simulated traffic pattern (the simulated traffic itself is not generated).
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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. -
Wednesday, April 09 2008
PRTG Traffic Grapher V6.2.1 includes support for Windows 2008 Server
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.
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Friday, February 01 2008
AMD's "Cool'n'Quiet" and Intel's "SpeedStep" can cause incorrect measurements for PRTG and IPCheck
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
- Disable "Cool'n'Quiet" or "SpeedStep" in the host's BIOS
- Enable "Time synchronization between virtual machine and host operating system" in the VMWare Tools applet which can be found in the Windows Tray inside the virtual system
Generally it seems to be a good idea to disable the two technologies when using monitoring system, regardless of virtual or real system. -
Thursday, January 24 2008
On some systems disabling DEP can solve problems running PRTG on 64-bit Windows
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.
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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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Wednesday, January 16 2008
More SNMP Performance with Version 6.2 of PRTG Traffic Grapher
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.
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Tuesday, January 08 2008
Installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher on Ubuntu Linux
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
- create a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 6,
- install Ubuntu 7.10 onto the virtual machine,
- install Wine 0.9.52 onto Ubuntu and
- install PRTG 6.x onto Ubuntu/Wine
- create a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 6,
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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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Wednesday, December 05 2007
Data Execution Prevention (DEP) may cause SNMP Helper or PRTG's packet sniffer to fail
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.
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Sunday, December 02 2007
How to Discern Excessive Bandwidth Usage using PRTG Traffic Grapher
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.
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Monday, November 19 2007
Changing existing custom sensors from Delta to Gauge (and vice-versa)
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.
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Tuesday, November 06 2007
New Beta of PRTG Version 6.2 Includes an SNMP Performance Boost
Today we have published a new beta version of PRTG 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.
Download this beta (the beta expires Dec 12th 2007).
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Friday, October 26 2007
What to do if an OID of a counter was changed by an SNMP device
There are SNMP devices that sometimes change the OID for a specific counter. This is common for systems running Windows 2003. If this happens PRTG can not continue to monitor this counter and it is easiest to add a new sensor.
If the historic data needs to be bound to the new sensor in order to retain the monitoring structure please refer to our knoweldge base article Binding historic datasets to new sensors and recalculating historic data for an individual sensor.
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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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Wednesday, October 17 2007
Bug in Cisco ASA 5505 causes PRTG to report the same traffic on all VLANs
We have had multiple queries regarding strange, respectively wrong readouts when monitoring certain ASA equipment. As we found out today, the problem is a bug in the 7.2 OS causing the SNMP iftable to forward erroneous return values to monitoring software, such as PRTG. Instead of graphing PER vlan values, this bug results in graphing the total number of untagged vlan packets for each vlan.
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Monday, October 08 2007
WindowsIT Pro mentions PRTG in the "8 More Absolutely Cool, Totally Free Utilities" list
The IT publication WindowsIT Pro has included PRTG in its latest collection of dynamite freeware for your USB toolkit. See the press clipping.
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Wednesday, September 12 2007
Most common causes of network outage include inadequate bandwidth, excessive file streaming and device misconfiguration
Our latest press release reports about the latest survey results from users of PRTG Traffic Grapher. It reveals that bandwidth management software is a key component in preventing network downtime.
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Friday, September 07 2007
What to do when no data is displayed in PRTG's Live Graphs
A new knowledgebase article has instructions what a user of PRTG Traffic Grapher can do when the "Live Graph" doesn't show graph lines for the monitoring data although monitoring seems to work ok.
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Wednesday, September 05 2007
What to do if the PRTG service does not start after shutting down the GUI
We have received sporadic error reports from users of our software PRTG Traffic Grapher where the program was not properly started "as a service" when the Windows GUI was closed.
In this case this new knowledgebase article has some instructions.
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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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Thursday, August 09 2007
How VC company Accel monitors bandwidth in their network with PRTG
Accel, a venture capital company with offices in London, England, and Palo Alto, California has been using PRTG Traffic Grapher for several years to monitor bandwidth consumption in their office network and the home networks of the home offices of the staff.
Read about their experiences in our latest case study.
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Thursday, August 02 2007
New version 6.1.1 of PRTG Traffic Grapher released
Yesterday we have released a new version of PRTG Traffic Grapher that adds three new features:
- Improved Multi-Sensor-Editing: A lot more sensor settings can now be edited for mutliple sensors at once, e.g. notification settings and groups.
- Support for French user interface: You can now run PRTG in French. A French manual is also included
- Webserver now has a "robots.txt" file: This avoids spidering of your PRTG web interface by search engine spiders
Additionally our PRTG history page lists 21 changes and bugfixes for this new version.
- Improved Multi-Sensor-Editing: A lot more sensor settings can now be edited for mutliple sensors at once, e.g. notification settings and groups.
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Monday, July 23 2007
Does my Cisco device (Router/Switch) support NetFlow Export?
It can become quite complicated to determine which Cisco devices support NetFlow Export and in what version. PRTG Traffic Grapher currently only supports NetFlow V5.
We have compiled the information about this topic which is available to us in a new article in our knowledge base.
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Tuesday, July 17 2007
Survey Finds PRTG Traffic Grapher Saves Network Administrators Hours a Week in Network Monitoring Time
In our latest customer survey we found that most users report half an hour of time savings per week or more after installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher.
We had 560 customers answering the survey and they told us,
- that over 70 percent report that network uptime/downtime monitoring and alerting are among the most important network management tasks for their organization
- that over 67 percent report that bandwidth usage and traffic monitoring are among the most important
- that 45 percent saw savings in network management time and
- that over 95 percent (!) would recommend the product to a colleague or peer
Read more in our press release.
- that over 70 percent report that network uptime/downtime monitoring and alerting are among the most important network management tasks for their organization
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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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Friday, June 01 2007
What does the sensor name "Error converting OID" mean when creating sensors using an OIDLIB in PRTG
After converting a vendor specific MIB file into a Paessler oidlib with Paessler's MIB Importer Tool and using this oidlib as source for the creation of a SNMP sensor in PRTG, "Error converting OID" appears in the name of the sensor. The sensor, however, works as expected.
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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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Tuesday, May 01 2007
PRTG Traffic Grapher - Convenient Network Monitoring via Mouse-Click
PRTG Traffic Grapher from Paessler offers systems administrators live data on the current network state as well as long-term utilization trends. So, line capacities of routers, firewalls, servers, and other network components can be systematically optimized. PRTG collects the required data and information from the SNMP capable devices to be controlled by using sensors that are set up accordingly while applying four different procedures.
Monitoring by applying the "Simple Network Management Protocol" is widely used and simple to install. It ensures that bandwidths and measurements such as CPU utilization, storage utilization, or temperature are always kept track of.
Read more in our latest press release
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Friday, April 13 2007
PRTG Version 6.1 introduces WLAN Packet Sniffing and German User Interface
With the latest version 6.1 of PRTG Traffic Grapher we introduce a new feature: Packet Sniffing in WLANs!
Using a specialized WLAN USB dongle hardware (available from the Paessler Online Shop) PRTG is able to inspect all network data packets travelling in your WLAN network in order to classify network traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters.
This feature is supported by the Freeware and Commercial Editions in version 6.1 or later. Also new in version 6.1 is the German user interface and manual.
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Tuesday, February 27 2007
Windows Event ID 7039 on machines running PRTG Traffic Grapher
If you run PRTG Traffic Grapher as a service on your computer you may see Windows Event ID 7039 in your System Event log.
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Tuesday, February 20 2007
How RAM memory is allocated when using top lists in PRTG Traffic Grapher
When using Toplists in PRTG Traffic Grapher for Packet Sniffers or NetFlow Collectors you should be aware that it can take a considerable amount of memory.
This knowledgebase article "How RAM memory is allocated when using top lists in PRTG Traffic Grapher" explains some details.
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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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Wednesday, January 31 2007
Increasing the width of the taglist in PRTG's web interface
Some users have asked us how they can increase the width of the taglist in PRTG's web interface. They use longer tag names and/or group names which are cropped when they use PRTG's default setting for the width of the left column.
Changing the width is actually pretty easy: One must only edit the widths in the CSS file.
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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...).
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Wednesday, January 24 2007
PRTG Traffic Grapher V6.0.6 released
Today we have released version 6.0.6 of PRTG Traffic Grapher. This version mainly adds the new feature of aggregate graphing (see this blog entry for details), some performance improvements for large installations as well as a number of bugfixes and smaller changes (see PRTG's history page for details).
The latest version can be downloaded from the PRTG download page.
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Tuesday, January 09 2007
Details about the meaning of the "Busy Sensors" value in PRTG Traffic Grapher
While you are using the Windows GUI of PRTG you will see a "Busy Sensors" value in the statusbar. In larger installations or installations with small intervalls you should have an eye on this value because it can tell you wether your PRTG setup may be close to an overload.
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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 20 2006
Monitoring a WRT54G/GS with PRTG
The LINKSYS WRT54G/GS routers are quite popular and offer the ability to upload your own firmware. With the right firmware you can monitor the router using SNMP.
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Monday, November 27 2006
New Beta available: PRTG V6.0.6 adds Aggregate Graphing
The latest beta version of PRTG 6 adds a feature that has been requested numerous times by many customers: Graph Aggregation! Using aggregated graphing you can now sum up the traffic data of two or more ports and use it just a like a new sensor for graphs, tables and reports.
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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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Monday, November 20 2006
New Guided Tour Movie: Introduction to PRTG 6
Today we have uploaded a new guided tour movie for PRTG Traffic Grapher onto our website. The tour shows how easy it is to create a sensor within PRTG's Windows user interface.
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Monday, November 13 2006
Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions: Part 5/5
Question #5: Does It Support the Three Common Methods for Acquiring Network-Usage Data?
A comprehensive bandwidth-monitoring solution should support Packet Sniffer applications, as well as SNMP and NetFlow protocols. Each data-acquisition method has pros and cons -- depending on your network configuration and your monitoring needs. That said, your bandwidth-monitoring solution should support all three methods and allow you to effectively monitor your traffic regardless of your current or future network configuration.
Here is a brief description and analysis of each method:
- Packet Sniffer: The Packet Sniffer inspects all network data packets passing a PC's network card(s) and classifies network traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters.
Advantage: Exact data, traffic can be accounted by IP and protocol.
Disadvantage: High load on monitoring system for high-traffic systems; network topology must be changed, so that all packets in the network are sent to the analyzing machine.
- NetFlow: The NetFlow protocol is supported by most Cisco routers to measure bandwidth usage. Although it is the most complex method to set up, it is also the most powerful method for monitoring high-traffic networks and can classify traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters.
Advantage: Best choice for high-traffic networks that need protocol analysis
Disadvantage: Only works with Cisco routers.
- SNMP: Simple Network Management Protocol is the most basic method of gathering bandwidth and network-usage data. It can be used to monitor bandwidth usage of routers and switches -- port-by-port -- as well as to perform device readings for memory and CPU load.
Advantage: Low bandwidth and CPU load caused by monitoring itself. Best choice for high-traffic networks that don't need protocol analysis
Disadvantage: Traffic can only be monitored in totals per device/port and cannot be differentiated by protocol.
Note: Only Packet Sniffer- and NetFlow-based monitoring methods allow you to measure traffic by IP address, MAC address and/or protocol. SNMP-based measurements are strictly port-based. - Packet Sniffer: The Packet Sniffer inspects all network data packets passing a PC's network card(s) and classifies network traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters.
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Friday, November 10 2006
Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions: Part 4/5
Question #4: Is the Price Right?
Cost, of course, is a major part of any procurement, but it should never be the sole or even leading variable in your evaluation of a monitoring solution. Bandwidth monitoring is simply too important to the overall success and viability of your operation for your team to be blinded -- one way or the other -- by price. Occasionally, cost can give you insight into how effective a solution may be, but it's certainly not a fail-proof predictor of efficacy.
Frankly speaking, it's both impractical and imprudent for your team to purchase solutions based almost entirely on price. As one can imagine, networking vendors weigh a complicated and unique set of internal and external variables to arrive at their various price points. In other words, price isn't necessarily linked to a product's functionality or features. And, as with any purchase, you should not use cost as a justification to bypass the due-diligence or research process that precedes any major procurement.
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Wednesday, November 08 2006
Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions: Part 3/5
Question #3: Does It Have an Intuitive Interface That Can be Customized?
It's critical that your solution allows users to create customized dashboards with graphs and tables that meet their specific departmental or project-based needs. Without customization, your monitoring tool may initially be well-received by team members, but, over time, it will likely become an under-used resource and be seen as something of a generic and predictable tool with limited practical functionality. Without customization, monitoring solutions become part of the operational status quo and, quite naturally, less of a staff priority. By comparison, customizable solutions prompt managers and team members to be engaged in the process, focus their monitoring efforts and take action to improve overall efficiencies. Monitoring bandwidth shouldn't become a static procedure, but, rather, an interactive one that complements constantly changing operational goals.
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Monday, November 06 2006
Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions: Part 2/5
Question #2: Does It Offer Secure Remote Access?
Ideally, the GUI of your preferred monitoring solution will be Web-based. In a truly global economy and in an era of increased telecommuting and flex schedules, your monitoring solution should be available to your entire team at any time -- no matter where they perform their work on any given day. Finding a Web-based solution becomes essential if your team isn't centralized in one office and is, instead, comprised of members in various far-flung offices. The more your staff can access the monitoring solution, the more they'lll use it and the more they'll pre-empt problems linked to performance and availability. Simply put, your monitoring solution shouldn't be anchored at a single location and hamstrung by basic geographic or logistical constraints when various Web-based applications exist.
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Friday, November 03 2006
Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions: Part 1/5
Question #1: Is It Easy to Install and Deploy?
Good monitoring solutions don't require users to embark on a multi-step process to get up and running. If the solution you're considering requires you to buy several new servers to support it, you may want to re-assess your choice. And if the first step in the deployment process calls for you to participate in vendor-guided classes on how to use the product, keep looking. Essentially, if it seems like merely deploying a solution will sap valuable staff time and resources, consider it something of a red flag, trust your instincts and move on to the next solution.
Put another way, if a monitoring solution is, in any way, difficult to install, it almost assuredly won't be fully integrated into your organization. In a software market full of network-monitoring solutions, it's entirely unnecessary for you or your team to engage in complex or confusing installations. The bottom line is if you have adequate network equipment, you shouldn't need extra hardware or outside help to support a robust monitoring solution.
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Wednesday, November 01 2006
Five reasons to get serious about bandwidth monitoring
Here is a short list of the top five reasons why you seriously should consider to implement bandwidth monitoring in your network:
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Tuesday, October 31 2006
The 64 Bit Counter Mystery: Trouble with a HP Procurve Gigabit Switch
We had upgraded the last remaining dark and slow 100 Mbit corner of our data center from 100 Mbit Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet the other day. We installed an HP Procurve 1800-8G which offers Gigabit for 8 ports.
As usual we began to monitor this switch using our PRTG software and found quite a surprise: PRTG reported steady peaks of 2.000.000 gigabit/s (2.000 terabit/s). Obviously something went wrong here.
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Monday, October 30 2006
How to Choose the Right Bandwidth-Monitoring Solution
If you work in the networking industry, you no doubt spend more time than you'd like putting out the proverbial fire and then wondering how it started.
Your network -- however well-conceived or well-engineered -- will, invariably, create problems for you and your team at some point. So for those of us in the business of preventing problems, it's essential that we lean on our bandwidth-monitoring solution and put it to work for us.
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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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Tuesday, September 26 2006
Running PRTG Traffic Grapher on a Linux computer
A new segment in the sphere of operating systems seems to build up. Somewhere between the paid-for Windows operating systems and the open-source Linux systems a new kind of offerings comes up: They are cheap or free, they are easy to install and to use (windows lookalikes) and.... They run Windows applications.
One sample is Linux XP Desktop (free download, $40) which is built on Red-Hat Linux and offers a GUI that appeals to users that are familiar with Windows. And it is able to run many Windows applications out-of-the-box. Another sample is ReactOS, which is in an early alpha stage currently.
Yes, it's true: Even PRTG Traffic Grapher can be run on this Linux system. The secret ingredient is called Wine.
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Monday, September 25 2006
Comparing MRTG with PRTG Traffic Grapher
The choice between MRTG and PRTG for your network bandwidth monitoring is - to some extent - a matter of how comfortable you are with configuration files, a manual installation and with adding additional software tools for special tasks. And there are some features that clearly separate both products, too.
If you are an experienced Linux user then the open source software MRTG can be a great choice since it can be configured to be a powerful and reliable helper for your daily network management. But in a business environment which mainly uses the Windows plattform I believe that an integrated "out-of-the-box" solution like PRTG offers the better value - even though it is not free.
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Thursday, September 21 2006
Top 5 reasons for sudden traffic peaks shown by bandwidth monitoring
Sometimes users of our network monitoring software PRTG Traffic Grapher contact our support team and report peaks in their bandwidth monitoring graphs. Most of these peaks only look like unusual high traffic, but some users have even seen spikes like 10 GBit/s for a sensor that actually monitors a 2 MBit/s connection....
Well, a gigabit peak for a data line with megabit rating clearly has to be regarded as a technical problem.
But in most other cases our support team together with the customer have found out - after some investigation - that the reported peaks were correct. There were caused by a number of different reaons and here is our Top 5 list of these resons:
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Friday, September 15 2006
A detailed look at changes in PRTG Version 6
Since the last version 5.x we have applied so many changes to PRTG when working on version 6 that I can not mention them down to the last detail. I already mentioned the most notable changes in Thursday's posting.
We know that many users are interested in a more detailed list, so here we go: Here is a list of most of the smaller, but still notable changes:
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Wednesday, September 13 2006
PRTG Traffic Grapher Version 6 Released
PRTG has become the Windows tool of choice for bandwidth and network usage monitoring. It brings many SNMP monitoring features from MRTG - which is well known in the Linux community - to the Windows plattform and adds a packet sniffer and NetFlow Monitoring for Cisco Routers. More then 100.000 users are currently using PRTG every day.
Today we have released the all new Version 6.0 of PRTG Traffic Grapher. This new version offers a number of new features and a redesigned Windows and Web user interface.
Here is a screenshot of the new interface:
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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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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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Wednesday, August 02 2006
PRTG Version 6 Enters Beta Test Phase
Good news for PRTG users: Today we have released the first beta of the upcoming version 6 of PRTG Traffic Grapher! Late night yesterday lead developer Jens Rupp gave his ok to make the download for "V6.0.0 build number 102" public.
The new version adds many features that have been requested by users of PRTG (there are more than 100.000 out there!)
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Wednesday, July 05 2006
How to move an installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher to another computer
If you plan to move your installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher onto another computer you should review this new article in the knowledge base. It explains what you need to do to move all your settings and all your historical data onto the new computer and also mentions a number of other aspects (licensing, router config changes etc.) that could be important. Read more
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Wednesday, June 14 2006
Latest Update for PRTG Traffic Grapher offers bugfixes and a new Web template
We have released a new version of PRTG Traffic Grapher today that fixes three minor bugs and adds a new template for the Web interface. The new template is quite simple and uses only very little graphics. Download the latest version
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Saturday, June 03 2006
How to change the data storage drive and folder of PRTG Traffic Grapher
This new article in the knowledge base explains how you can move the data of PRTG onto another drive, e.g. if the current drive becomes too full. Read more
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Wednesday, May 31 2006
Minor bugfix version of PRTG Traffic Grapher released
This latest update fixes a small problem with the CSV export and with the MS SQL Server Extension of SNMP Helper. More details
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