Detailed System Requirements
for PRTG Network Monitor

In order to install and work with PRTG Network Monitor you need:

Operating Systems for PRTG Core Server and PRTG Probe

The 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the following operating systems are officially supported for PRTG "Core Service" and "Probe Service" (Intel x86/x64 architectures only):

• Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or later
• Microsoft Windows Vista*
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008*
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Windows 7

* For performance reasons, we recommend to not use Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 R1, especially when monitoring via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Using these operating systems you will only be able to use a limited number of WMI sensors! If you must use Windows Server 2008 R1 we strongly recommend installing Service Pack 2 (SP2).

Some sensor types need the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed on the computer running the PRTG probe: Either on the local system (on every node, if in a cluster), or on the system running a remote probe. Depending on the sensor type, the required version is 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0; e.g. for monitoring VMware or XenServer virtual environments, you need .NET 4.0 (with latest updates).

Hardware Requirements for PRTG Core Server and PRTG Probe

Hardware requirements mainly depend on the sensor types and intervals used. The following values are provided as reference for common usage scenarios of PRTG (based on a default sensor interval of 60 seconds).

• CPU: An average PC built in 2007 can easily monitor 1,000 sensors (see sensor type specific notes below). PRTG supports native x86 architectures.
• RAM: Minimum requirement: 1024 MB RAM. You will need about 150 Kilobyte of RAM per sensor.
• Hard Disk: You will need about 200 Kilobyte of disk space per sensor per day.
• An Internet connection is required for license activation (via HTTP or email).

There are also non-hardware dependent limitations for some sensor types, e.g. WMI and SNMP V3 sensors. These limitations can be overcome by distributing the sensors across multiple remote probes. If you plan installations with more than 500-1,000 sensors or more than 10 packet sniffing/NetFlow sensors please consult the PRTG Site Planner tool.

Apart from these limitations you should not experience performance issues for installations up to 5.000 sensors in most situations. In the blog article "Page Load Times of PRTG for Large Installations" we have published web page load times for larger installations on selected servers.

Here is a sample for a very large installation: We have successfully tested PRTG Network Monitor running with 20,000 SNMP sensors on a Dual-CPU Quad-Core system (Dell 2900 III, 16 GB RAM, Windows 2003 64-Bit). This scenario requires about 3.5 GB of RAM for the PRTG processes and it creates about 800 GB of data on the disk for one year. An installation of this size is able to monitor about 400 SNMP-enabled switches with 48 ports each.

Running PRTG on Virtual Machines

PRTG Core Server as well as PRTG Probe can be run on virtualized platforms. The following virtualization platforms were tested successfully:

Note: When monitoring more than 1,000 sensors we recommend to use dedicated real hardware instead of a virtual machine. In our experience, this can improve performance a lot.

Web Browser Requirements

The following browsers are officially supported for the PRTG web interface (in order of performance and reliability):

• Google Chrome 10 or later (recommended)
• Mozilla Firefox 4.0 or later
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 or later
• Note: Older browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 1.x-3.x) and mobile browsers may not be able to display the full featured AJAX interface. In this case you can use the feature limited HTML-interface which does not require CSS or Javascript capability.
  

Requirements for Monitored Devices

• SNMP monitoring: The monitored device(s) must be equipped with SNMP Version 1, 2c or 3 (i.e. a SNMP-compatible software must be installed on the device). SNMP must be enabled on the device and the machine running PRTG must be allowed access to the SNMP interface.
• WMI monitoring: In order to use WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) monitoring you will need a Windows network. For host PC and client PCs Windows XP (and later) are officially supported. Windows 2000 is not officially supported. Please do not use Windows Vista or Windows 2008 R1 on hosts PCs for WMI monitoring, both have WMI performance issues.
• NetFlow, sFlow monitoring: The device must be configured to send NetFlow (V5 or V9), sFlow (V5), jFlow (V5) data packets to the machine running a PRTG Probe.
• Packet Sniffing: Only data packets passing the local machine's network card can be analyzed. Switches with so-called "monitoring ports" are necessary for network-wide monitoring in switched networks.

Requirements for the Enterprise Console (Windows GUI)

The optional PRTG Enterprise Console (Windows GUI) runs under all Windows versions (Windows XP or later).

Requirements for the iOS and Android Based User Interfaces

The iPRTG app requires iOS 3.0 or later. PRTGdroid requires Android OS 2.1 or later.

Planing an installation with hundreds of sensors or more?

As a rule of thumb an average PC/server built in the year 2007 or later should be able to monitor 1,000 sensors with ease (some exceptions for SNMP V3, WMI and packet sniffing apply). For larger installations please refer to our knowledgebase article Planning Large Installations of PRTG Network Monitor 9. Please see also our Knowledge Base article How can I speed up PRTG - especially for large installations?