Knowledge Base

PRTG Network Monitor offers a broad range of monitoring features covering bandwidth and network usage monitoring, as well as uptime monitoring.

• More than 40 sensor types for comprehensive monitoring of small, medium and large networks.
  • SNMP: Sensors using the Simple Network Management Protocol (supports SNMP V1, V2c and V3)
    • SNMP Traffic: Supports monitoring of bandwidth (bits/s) and volume (bytes), as well as number of packets and errors via SNMP for a particular port or network card on PCs, servers, switches, firewalls, printers
    • SNMP Custom: Monitors one specific OID
    • SNMP Library: SNMP libraries (which can be created from MIB files) make it easy to create specific sensors
    • Includes extensive OID libraries for quick monitoring setup for common OIDs.
    • Paessler’s own MIB compiler (freeware) can be used to load vendor specific MIB filess for use with PRTG 7
  • WMI: Sensors that use Windows built-in WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to access monitoring values
    • WMI CPU Load: Measures a system’s CPU load (total and per-CPU)
    • WMI Memory: Displays free system memory (MB and %)
    • WMI Disk Space: Free disk space on fixed drives (MB and % per drive)
    • WMI Network Card: Measures traffic going through network cards
    • WMI Page File: Checks the usage of the Windows page file
    • WMI Service: Checks if a service is running and optionally restarts a service if not
    • WMI Event Log Sensor: Monitors a system’s application, system and security event log for specific events
    • WMI Process: Monitors one process via WMI
    • WMI File: Monitors file size and existence, as well as changes to a file via WMI
    • WMI Query: Performs a custom WMI query
    • WMI Vital System Data: Users can select from more than 20 different vital Windows system parameters (CPU: Percent Processor Time, CPU: Processor Queue Length, CPU: Processor Percent Privileged Time, CPU: Processor Percent User Time, Thread Context Switches, Memory: Free Physical Memory, Memory: Total Visible Memory, Memory: Pages/sec, Memory: Page Faults/sec, Memory: Page Reads/sec, Memory: Page Writes/sec, Memory: Pool Nonpaged bytes, Pagefile Usage, Disk: Percent Disk Time, Disk: Current Disk Queue Length, Disk: Reads/sec, Disk: Writes/sec, Network: Bytes Total/sec, Network: Bytes Received/sec, Network: Bytes Sent/sec, Server: Bytes Total/sec, Server: Bytes Received/sec, Server: Bytes Sent/sec, etc.)
    • WMI Exchange Server 2003: Monitors vital readings of an Exchange Server 2003
  • HTTP based services
    • HTTP: Monitors a web server via the HTTP protocol
    • HTTP Full Page: uses Internet Explorer browser to measure download time for a webpage including all page elements
    • HTTP Advanced: Monitors a web server via the HTTP protocol with various advanced settings (e.g. check a web page’s content or to use proxy server or authentication), also measures download bandwidth, number of bytes and time-to-first-byte
      
    • HTTP Transaction: Monitors a web server using a set of URLs to monitor whether logins or shopping carts are working properly
    • HTTP Content: Monitors a value returned by a HTTP request
  • VMware Servers
    • VMware ESX Host Server: Monitors vital parameters of VMware ESX Host servers
    • VMware Virtual Machine: Monitors vital parameters of a single virtual machine (for VMware ESX Servers and VMware Virtual Center Servers)
  • File Servers
    • Share Disk Space: Monitors free disk space of SMB shares (Windows/Samba)
    • File: Monitors a file's existence, size, and age and also discovers changes to the file
    • Folder: Monitors a folder's availability; the contained files' count, age, and size; changes to the folder's content.
    • HDD Health Sensor: uses SMART feature for IDE disk drives to measure drive temperature, drive failures, etc.
  • Mail Servers
    • SMTP: Monitors SMTP-based email servers (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
    • POP3: Monitors POP3-based email servers (Post Office Protocol V3)
    • IMAP: Monitors IMAP -based email servers (Internet Message Access Protocol)
    • SMTP&POP3 and SMTP&IMAP Email Round Trip Sensor: sends an email by SMTP and measures the time until it reaches a POP3/IMAP inbox (see blog entry "Email Round Trip Monitoring")
  • Various TCP and UDP based services
    • PING: Performs one or more PINGs to monitor the availability of a device and optionally measure packet loss (in percent)
    • PORT: Checks the availability of TCP-based network services
    • FTP: Monitors the availability of a FTP server
    • DNS: Checks a DNS (Domain Name Service) server
    • RDP (Remote Desktop): Checks the availability of a device’s RDP service
  • SQL Servers
    • Microsoft SQL Server: Checks Microsoft SQL Server connections
    • MySQL Server: Checks MySQL Server connections
    • Oracle SQL Server: Checks Oracle SQL Server connections
  • NetFlow
    • NetFlow: Monitors Cisco switches using NetFlow V5
    • NetFlow (Custom): User configurable version of the NetFlow sensor
  • Packet Sniffing
    • Packet Sniffer (Header): Looks at the headers of the data packets to account traffic by IP, by port, by protocol, etc.
    • Packet Sniffer (Content): Reassembles data packets to streams and looks into the payload data of the streams to assess the type of traffic (e.g. SMTP, HTTP, IMAP, file sharing, NETBIOS, etc.)
    • Packet Sniffer (Custom): Accounts packet data implementing user-specific rules
  • Sensor Factory: make-your-own sensor based on measurements of other sensors; successor to the "Aggregation Sensor" in PRTG 6 (see blog entry "The Sensor Factory")
  • Custom Sensors: users can create their own sensor types using scripting and programming languages, as well as custom WQL (WMI Query Language) scripts. Various samples included.
• “Smart” sensors that e.g. automatically discover quad-core CPUs, allowing to monitor the total CPU load, as well as the individual cores
• PRTG automatically monitors the “system health” of the core server and of each probe in order to discover overloading situations or badly configured systems that may distort monitoring results.
• Various methods for alerts and notifications (email, SMS, pager message, HTTP request, event log, syslog, SNMP Trap, etc.).
  
• Notifications can be triggered by individually definable parameters and contain various entries of releveant information.