What do I have to take into account when planning a large installation of PRTG Network Monitor?

This article applies as of PRTG 20

Planning large installations of PRTG Network Monitor

The maximum number of sensors that you can monitor with one installation of PRTG mainly depends on the monitoring technology and the monitoring intervals you use. See also our system requirements that show recommended sensor counts for an ideal PRTG setup.

  • SNMP v1/v2, PING, PORT, and HTTP are the recommended sensor types for scenarios with thousands of sensors.
  • SNMP v3 has performance limitations because of the use of encryption. Furthermore, keep in mind that SNMP v3, unlike SNMP v1 and v2c, does not scale with more CPU power. Because of this limitation, you can monitor only a limited number of sensors per second using SNMP v3.
  • For WMI monitoring, try to keep the number of WMI sensors per probe below 120 sensors (with a 60-second interval) or 600 sensors (with a 300-second interval).
  • For NetFlow (or sFlow, jFlow) monitoring, the maximum number of sensors depends on the traffic pattern, the number of Flow packets per second received by the PRTG probe, as well as the performance of the probe system.
  • Packet Sniffing creates the highest CPU load on the probe system. This technology is only recommended for monitoring low traffic connections (<50 Mbit/s steady stream). If traffic often goes beyond 10 Mbit/s, a dedicated remote probe should be used.
  • For best performance of VMware sensors, we strongly recommend Windows Server 2012 R2 on the probe system with the VMware sensors. On this operating system, you can use up to 300 VMware sensors with a 60-second scanning interval. See the article How can I increase the connection limit on VMware systems? for details.

To overcome any limitations mentioned above, you should distribute the sensors over two remote probes or more.

As a rule of thumb, you should not experience any performance issues with installations if you stay below 5,000 sensors, below 30 remote probes, and below 30 user accounts. If the installation is planned well, PRTG can scale much higher.

For high-speed operation of the PRTG web interface (page times below 500ms), we recommend that you stay below 5,000 sensors per installation. For clusters we recommend that you stay below 2,500 sensors per cluster. If you plan an installation with more than 5,000 sensors on a physical device, or if you want to set up more than 5,000 sensors with PRTG running on a virtual machine, please contact our Presales team for consultation. They will advise you on sensor limits and scanning intervals. See also our Best Practice Guide: Running large installations of PRTG in a virtual environment.

Performance can also vary depending on the number of channels per sensor. Note that sensors with more than 50 channels are not officially supported and can have a high impact on system performance.

For more information, see also the PRTG Manual: Detailed System Requirements

See also