PRTG Install Instructions

I am a bit of a Monitoring junky, and while I am mostly fluent Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager, Observium, and Nagios/Opennms I do have a passing interest in PRTG

For myself, my current Observium Install does not have the MIBs installed to monitor my Dell x1052 Switch, and I liked to see a little more into how the switch is performing.

PRTG is known for handling network gear from all manufactuers very well, so I was curious to see how it performs.

First step is to go to PRTG’s website and download a trial.  PRTG will provide you are 100% functional trial key.  From there you build you host for PRTG, which for me was a low powered Virtual Machine.  The installer is extremely simple, just put in the Trial Key and Trial Key Name and let it install.  Once installed you will see two Icons on your desktop. As an astute reader pointed out, you are limited to 100 sensors, but this is perfectly fine for a homelab.

You can navigate to your servers IP address (or host name), and select the default login.

PRTG can be very busy and distracting, but lets focus on getting our Dell Switch monitored.

Let’s click on Devices and the Add Device

Then we select Network Infrastructure

Next we plug in a device name, and an IP.  There is more configuration that can be done ahead of time to auto-discover items, but we won’t go into that here.

Once your device pops up on the Main Page, click Auto Discover.

After a while, we will see the following sensors pre-populated.

In a future post, I’ll show how to add custom sensors to monitor CPU, Memory and much more your Network Devices and Switches.