Every so often customers using our monitoring tools (e.g. PRTG Network Monitor) report issues when trying to monitor their systems using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) sensors. In most cases, these issues stem from a malfunctioning WMI configurations/installations.
Today we have published our Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems that will help users of PRTG to track down most issues.
Today we have uploaded a new version of SNMP Tester, our simple but efficient testing tool for SNMP connections. With SNMP Tester you can run simple SNMP requests against a device in your network.
The program is based on the SNMP technologies that are also built into PRTG Network Monitor and the idea is to have a tool that enables the user to debug SNMP activities in order to find communication and/or data problems in SNMP monitoring configurations. If the SNMP connection works with this test program it will also work with PRTG.
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).
Today we have released a new version of our MIB Importer Tool. The MIB Importer is used to convert so-called “SNMP MIB files” into a format suitable for our monitoring applications, especially PRTG Network Monitor. MIB files are usually supplied by device vendors and describe the available monitoring objects of a device.
This new version 2.0 includes support for PRTG Network Monitor 7 and includes many improvements of the MIB parser aimed at improving compatibility with MIB files that only conform loosely to the RFCs (which happens quite often actually).
Our Card Packet Counter is a small tool that shows live stats and a short term statistical history about the network data packets and streams passing a local network card. Using the Packet Sniffing Engine of PRTG Network Monitor it looks at all network packets that pass a specific network card.
It was mainly developed to debug technical issues between PCs and the packet sniffing engine which is built into PRTG Network Monitor. But it is also a very useful tool for other network problem finding situations - and it’s free.
Paessler NetFlow Tester is a small program that simply dumps the data of all NetFlow packets that a computer receives from a Cisco router. This can be useful when debugging bandwidth monitoring configurations based on Cisco’s NetFlow protocol, e.g. in order to find out whether packets actually reach the target system.
Cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services recently announced support for hosting of Windows based servers on its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This new offering can now easily be used to create a cheap Remote Probe server for your own installation of PRTG Network Monitor!
To extended our own global network of probes (we use it as a demo website for visitors interested in PRTG and as a test platform for PRTG as well) we created a new remote probe running on EC2 in less than 30 minutes.
Here are the steps we took:
Today we have opened up our PRTG DEMO installation using our global probe network for public access. Now visitors can access the current monitoring status as well as maps and reports through a “read-only” user account (a new feature of PRTG V 7.0.9).
This PRTG installation uses five remote probes located around the globe (San Francisco CA, London UK, Cologne DE, Nuremberg DE, Singapore SG) and monitors our own servers (including our webservers, 3 firewalls, and our mail server).
Simply go to http://prtg.paessler.com and click on “Login”.
Finally the latest upgrade for users of PRTG Network Monitor is available. And this upgrade is a worthwhile one! More than 200 changes and improvements along with a number of bugfixes have been built into the product.
The most important changes are:
Please see our history of changes for a detailed list of new features, changes and bugfixes and visit the PRTG download page to get the installer files.
Many users of the freeware of PRTG Network Monitor use the software to simply monitor their Internet router and to find out how much bandwidth they consume in a month. The Linksys RVS 4000 is a good and common example and we will look at its details for this blog post. Many other Internet access routers will show quite similar behaviour.
If you let PRTG’s auto-discovery scan the router’s IP you will get the following sensors: