CEO's Blog

Dirk Paessler's Network Monitoring Insights

Thursday, August 26 2010

Release Candidate 1 of PRTG 8 Out Now

Yesterday, Paessler released the first release candidate of its new version of PRTG. The beta test of PRTG has been running since July 13. Meanwhile, we’re working at full speed to get PRTG 8 ready.

Still, we’re happy about every feedback we get from our customers. User feedback has always been a fundamental part of PRTG's development. Many user suggestions have already been implemented during the test period.

Grab the chance: Download and install the current beta today, and take part in contributing to your favorite monitoring software! The release candidate is the most stable PRTG 8 beta version released until now. All information and download on the PRTG 8 beta test web page.

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Monday, August 16 2010

New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 4: New Graph Types

While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features!

One frequently requested feature was the possibility to show filled and stacked graphs. Here you go: With PRTG 8, we introduce an optional new appearance for our data graphs! You can now set graphs to be “filled” or “stacked”, and you can even display data using the positive/negative y-axis, which is quite handy for showing traffic in and traffic out in one graph.

The new graph types can be used when displaying live data as well as when generating reports. See some examples below. By the way, you can find the radio buttons to enable these features in the system settings and the sensor settings.

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Tuesday, August 10 2010

Vintage Browsers and PRTG: Why We Do Not Support IE6/IE7 Any More

There is an obvious trend for application design nowadays: Everybody wants web based applications! They offer three big advantages:

1. web based applications only require a web browser on the end-users’ computers

2. usage is, in most cases, easy to learn

3. they can be centrally managed by the administrators

We anticipated this trend in 2006 when we designed the architecture of PRTG 7 which completely relies on a web based user interface.

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Wednesday, August 04 2010

News from the PRTG Community

Enabling its users to write their own custom sensors, PRTG offers a powerful option to extend existing network monitoring to make it even more convenient. Although PRTG offers out-of-the-box monitoring for a huge variety of devices and systems, sometimes system administrators have special requirements in very specific setups. These can be met using own script or EXE files that can be easily integrated in the central monitoring solution.
Sensors at Google Code Project

At a Google Code Project Hosting website for PRTG7 Add-ons, users share their home-made scripts and EXE files that can be used as PRTG sensors. For example, one of our most active users, Gerard Feijth, released several custom sensors during the last months, all implementing features which users had asked for in the Paessler Knowledge Base:

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Tuesday, August 03 2010

New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 3: Introducing "The PRTG Cluster"

While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features!

With version 8, we introduce a completely new and up-to-date feature: PRTG’s failover clustering. It is included in all licenses and enables you to set up a fail-safe monitoring system with seamless data—no more data gaps when a system crashes or when you have to restart your server (not even a software upgrade of PRTG will stop monitoring).

I want to give you a little insight into what our clustering does and how to configure it easily.
Simple Failover Cluster

The most common setup is two PRTG servers running “side-by-side” in a single failover cluster. The first node is the Master Node and is responsible for the configuration, management, alerting, and reporting. If this PRTG instance should fail, e.g. due to a server crash or connectivity issues, the second node (i.e. the Failover Node) takes over the master role and continues the monitoring until the original Master Node is back online.

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Tuesday, July 27 2010

New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 2: New Native Linux and Mac OS Sensors

While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features!

Monitoring Linux systems was already possible in earlier versions of PRTG (an “SNMP daemon”, like net-snmp had to be installed on the machines). In version 8, PRTG now monitors Linux systems using dedicated sensors supporting Linux/Unix and also Mac OS X without the need to install or change anything on the target machines.

SSH, WBEM, or SNMP

Using the technologies SSH or WBEM, PRTG requests information about CPU load, memory status or hard disks directly from the systems.

When SSH is used, the data is sent via a secure connection, ensuring you do not compromise the security of your systems while transferring monitoring data via the network.

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Thursday, July 22 2010

New Features in PRTG 8 - Part 1: Enhanced Web Interface

While the beta test of PRTG 8 is running we are posting a series of blog articles about new features!

For version 8, we have refurbished the web interface, making it even more intuitive and easy to use. The new interface reveals a cleaner look, has seen numerous improvements (many of them were suggested by PRTG users), integrates Google Maps, and displays helpful monitoring data information on mouse over, enabling the system administrator to gain an overview of his network even more quickly.
A New Look and a New Sensor Status

Flat icons and a restructured interface define the web interface of PRTG 8, which remains the vital part for the usage of PRTG for all monitoring and configuration tasks. We have kept a lot of established and popular functionalities, such as the intelligent auto-folding function in the device tree view or the arrangement of sensor information in different tabs.

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Tuesday, July 13 2010

The First Public Beta of PRTG 8 Is Here

Two years and 14 days ago, on June 30th 2008, we released the last new major version: version 7 of PRTG Network Monitor. Since then PRTG has seen numerous improvements, new features and enhancements.

Now, the next major version is getting close to completion. With version 8 PRTG takes another big leap forward with hundreds of improvements and many new features.
Clustering and More

With this new version we introduce a unique new feature that allows PRTG users to create fail-safe, distributed monitoring systems: The "PRTG Cluster" where up to 5 PRTG instances ("nodes") work together to create a fail-safe monitoring system.

We have implemented numerous new features:

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Sunday, June 27 2010

See a Preview of PRTG 8 at Cisco Live in Las Vegas

If you are visiting Cisco Live 2010 in Las Vegas this week (June 27th - July 1st, 2010) you have a chance to see a preview of the upcoming new major version 8 of PRTG!

Come and meet us at booth #643 in the exhibition area! Ken and Aurelio are ready to introduce you to our software product PRTG Network Monitor and will be happy to show you PRTG 8!

See our press release about Cisco Live 2010.

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Monday, June 21 2010

iPRTG 2 - The Personal Network Monitoring Assistant on Your iPhone

As of now, iPRTG 2 is available in the iTunes store! iPRTG is a personal network monitoring assistant for your PRTG Network Monitor software. Always with you on your iPhone, it allows to view the current status of your network on the go.

Using iPRTG, you benefit from many interesting features—wherever you are:

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Thursday, May 27 2010

iPRTG in a Completely New Version - Beta Testers Wanted

Since last August users of the popular smartphone Apple iPhone can download and install a dedicated app that brings PRTG to their phone.

We have received a lot of feedback and requests for enhancements. During the last months our partner company beyond content went back into their labs and actually rewrote the whole app from scratch! New development tools for the iPhone and some new API calls on behalf of PRTG's API allowed the developers to come up with an app that just blows you away!

So today I am happy to announce the new version 2 of iPRTG.

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Thursday, May 20 2010

How to Use Google Font API for the Web Interface of PRTG Network Monitor

Yesterday Google have published their new "Google Fonts API" which enables webmasters to use a selection of attractive fonts for their websites. Usage of the service is free of charge.

Using this API is a quick and straightforward way to individualize a PRTG installation. Here is a sample screenshot:

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Monday, May 17 2010

"Real World" Performance Comparison of CDN (Content Delivery Network) Providers

Since February visitors of our website http://www.cloudclimate.com have the possibility to measure "website asset delivery speed" of 24 CDN and cloud providers using their own internet connection (see the blog post). The results for each user are stored in our database and we now have gathered the performance results of 340,000 requests.

There is something special about our test: We have "real surfer" measurements for the 24 providers because we have actually used the "real world" Internet connections of our website visitors to run the test requests. Most CDN comparison tests that we have seen published on the Internet were created by using just a few measurement points, and often - to make things even more unrealistic - the measurements were taken out of professional data centers (which, in most cases, have high speed connectivity anyway). 24% of the tests were run from inside the USA, 9% each from Germany and the UK, the rest came from countries all over the world.

So now it is time to dive into the data and draw some conclusions.

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Wednesday, April 21 2010

Top 5 Troubleshooting Tips for Your WMI Problems

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a mighty tool for system administrators to monitor and to manage a whole Windows network from one central point. It allows you to start processes, read the Event Log history or even send a command to reboot a system for all computers in your network.

Unfortunately, using WMI can be tricky. In most cases security and user account related problems can cause trouble. Sometimes even more complex issues occur.

Users of PRTG Network Monitor—which makes extensive use of WMI for Windows monitoring—often ask us for configuration help. We have compiled several documents to help them.

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Thursday, April 15 2010

PRTG's Email Round Trip Sensor and Google Mail

Email round trip sensors ensure the end-to-end delivery of emails and make it possible to monitor availability and performance of a complete email delivery process.

In order to test your own mail servers for delivery to external mail accounts, you need a third party mail account on the Internet. Our experience is that round trip monitoring works very well with Google Mail, as it operates reliably and there are virtually no downtimes on Google's side (which means practically no false alarms).

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