Monitoring My Sites with PRTG Network Monitor

I’ve been trying a ton of uptime/network monitoring services lately. I tried a number of hosted/pay by the month services and also ones you install on your own server or others you run on a windows desktop. Of the self hosted solutions I came across one called PRTG Network Monitor stood out. It looked like a real enterprise solution but they that a freeware version which allowed an inexperienced noob such as myself get a chance to play with some nice network monitoring software.

Installation was super easy. I think i double clicked on an exe on my windows 2008 R2 server and within 3 or 4 min i was already logged into the admin panel to setup my sensors. At first I was completely overwhelmed and felt why am i even trying to figure this out this is way overkill and above my skillset. But I kept poking around for 15 or 30 min and the puzzle pieces slowly started coming together. I started filling out the entry forms with info that i thought might work, and low and behold, much of it did. In fact, it was probing my server at softlayer so well that cPanel banned my ip from checking on it anymore. That’s because i set the probe time for like 1 min just to test, but then forgot to switch it off. Now i have it set to 5 min and i think thats good.

PRTG Network Monitor allows you to monitor at least 15 to 20 different protocols on your server as well as being able to check server load, disk space, and other internal health diagnostics. The servers I’ll have it monitor are my CentOS installs, Windows Virtual Machines, as well as my VMware ESXi host. Also, I have my PRTG running inside an ESXi virtual machine and it works great.

PRTG also allows you to monitor transactions in case you want to regularly make sure your shopping cart checkout is functioning. I haven’t done it yet but basically you download their URL Recorder, then you manually conduct whatever actions you want performed, and it records all the get and post requests which you can then input into your http monitoring sensor. It also tracks cookies and some other things but I haven’t used it yet so I’m not sure how it works exactly.

If you’ve got an iphone or ipod touch you’ve got to spend the 12 bucks for their iphone network monitoring app because its really nice. I saw the company they had develop it and it looks like they are top notch iphone developers and it really shows through in the app.

Here is the PRTG website if you want to try it yourself: http://www.paessler.com/prtg/