Troubleshooting Share Monitoring Under PRTG 7

A network share is generally a computer object that can be accessed from another computer over a LAN, allowing said object to be virtually used as an object belonging to the local machine. Although PRTG Network Monitor 7 is able to monitor said shares using the File, Folder and SMB Share sensors, we have received multiple user reports stating that this type of access is not working properly in some instances.

Although we cannot precisely explain why users are getting errors when adding shares (in most instances the error stems from the Windows API) and, although at times it is possible to connect to said shares using Windows Explorer, this does not automatically mean it will work with PRTG as well. However, there are a few things one can try in such situations:

• Double check the 'share' setting in the sensor, so that it starts with the share name and not with any backslashes or the target machine name
• Try the computer/netbios name, the fully qualified domain name and the IP address as 'Host' setting in the corresponding (target) device
• Check that the IPC$ share is available at the target host
• Check that the firewall is open (UDP and TCP) for ports 137-139 and especially for port 445 for all applications/users
• Check that no other software (Internet security/virus scanner) intercepts the connection. Try temporarily disabling these applications
• Use a domain admin account as service logon name for the probe device
• Check the group policies whether Windows service applications have restrictions for remote logons or share connections or similar
• Try the 'non-service' version of the PRTG probe If all of the above fails, please search for the exact error message (without the error number in parenthesis): you should get a large number of results which might help finding the actual cause for this issue.

There are no settings in PRTG except the host name (device), the share name (sensor) and the Windows credentials (device or inherited from above groups) which actually affect sensors using SMB Shares.