Pässler PRTG 17.3.32.2478

I’ve been exploring Pässler PRTG on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (Microsoft Imagine Premium) for the past couple of days. While the system is impressive and on the border of being overwhelming, it lacks complete IPv6 support.

The web interface is IPv4 only, and the NetFlow v9 collector only understands IPv4. PRTG can do PING, SNMP, etc, over IPv6, but you can only specify whether PRTG should contact a device using IPv4 or IPv6, not both. For as long as our networks remain dual-stack it makes sense to explore both network protocols simultaneously, in the same manner we can do with Icinga and Nagios, i.e. specify IPv4 and IPv6 addresses where applicable. A workaround is to register a device twice, once for IPv4 and again for IPv6. Be careful not to create too many duplicate sensors.

I wish PRTG would ask me if I wanted to run autodiscovery after installing it. PRTG detected our core switch as the DHCP (relay) service, duplicating all the sensors it could find.

Neither SNMP nor PRTG are ZFS aware, and in many cases it’s utterly pointless to monitor a lot of ZFS filesystems. Instead we should monitor ZFS pools, if only that were possible.

SNMP doesn’t convey whether a filesystem is diskbased or not, so I had to remove sensors for mountpoints such as /dev, /dev/fd, /proc, /usr/compat/linux/proc, /var/Named/dev, etc.