This article explains how you can set up a core server of PRTG Network Monitor 7 as a monitoring system on the EC2 cloud hosting system of the Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Due of the technical concept of EC2 you must - compared to the usual hosting systems - take a few extra steps if you want to run PRTG 7 on Amazon EC2. The most important aspect is that the virtual machines (called AMIs = "Amazon Machine Image") are not persistent. As soon as you shut down a virtual server all changes that were made to its disks will be lost. To keep your configuration, historic monitoring data etc. alive you must attach an EBS (Elastic Block Storage) drive to your AMI and write your data to this persistent storage.

Note: There is also an knowledgebase article that explains how to install a PRTG probe on Amazon EC2

The steps are:

• Starting a new Windows AMI
• Attaching an EBS drive
• installing PRTG onto the EBS drive
• Moving PRTG's data storage folder to the EBS drive
• Bundling the AMI (it is like taking a snapshot of a virtual machine)
• Taking a Snapshot of the EBS storage (as a backup)
• Finally configuring your sensors and running your monitoring

The steps in detail are:

1. If you don't have an Amazon AWS account please open an new AWS account and set up your payment etc. information
2. Go to the Amazon AWS Management Console and sign in
3. Preparations
   • At the top left choose the desired region (US East or Europe West) where you want your monitoring system to be located
   • Click "Elastic IPs" and allocate a new Elastic IP (this will become your permanent IP for the monitoring system)
   • Click "Key Pairs" and create a new Key Pair. The web page will offer you a download of a .PEM file (download it and open it in a text editor, we'll need it later to acquire the server's admin password)
   • Click "Security Groups" and create a new security group. Consider this the firewall rule set for your server. After creation you can edit the allowed ports in the lower pane. Enable access to port 80 (http), port 443 (https) and port 3389 (Remote Desktop). If you want to connect a remote probe to your core server also open port 23560 (default probe connection port).
   • Click "Volumes" and create an EBS volume (e.g. 100 GB)
4. Click "Instances" and Launch a new instance. This will actually create and start a new virtual machine for you. We used the image "Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2003" (ami-d8e9c1ac). On the following page you can set various parameters:
   
   • Number of instances: 1
   • Instance type: Here you choose the CPU/memory resources of your server. The "m1.small" option should be enough for monitoring of a few hundred sensors. It costs about US$ 90 per month.
   • Key Pair: Choose the key pair that you created before
   • Security Group: Choose the one that you created before
5. That's it. Click "Launch" and after a few minutes your virtual server will be online.
6. As soon as the server is shown with a "running" state, right click the instance in the list and choose "Get Default Administrator Password". You will need to paste the content of the PEM file that you have downloaded before. Jot down the password.
7. Go to Elastic IPs, right click the IP you have created before and attach it to the server instance
8. Go to Volumes, right click the Volume you have created before and attach it to the server instance (e.g. as drive E:)
9. Start your Remote Desktop Client and connect to the IP adress of the Elastic IP, log in using "administrator" and the admin password
10. In the Remote Desktop session:
    • Optional: Change the password of the administrator
    • Open Disk Management, partition and format the EBS drive (E:)
    • Download and install PRTG Network Monitor on the new drive E:. During installation
      
      • choose the SSL webinterface (recommended to keep your passwords save!)
      • Enter your license key
    • After installation of PRTG
      • Start both the Probe Admninistrator and the Core Administrator tools
      • Stop Core and Probe Services
      • Change "Data Folder" from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Paessler\PRTG Network Monitor\V7\
      • so that data resides on E: (e.g. e:\prtg7data)
      • Click OK in both Admin tools (this also restarts the services)
11. Log into the PRTG Website using a webbrowser and the Elastic IP address
12. Activate your license key

That's it. Your PRTG Instance is now running on EC2.

We recommend to bundle the virtual machine into a new AMI image. This takes a snapshot of your installation and you will be able to restart a server image right at this point anytime later (You will need an Amazon S3 account to do this). You should also take a snapshot of the EBS storage.