Is there a recommended approach to find the problems which cause errors with WMI sensors? Can you provide a troubleshooting guide how to solve these WMI issues to get my WMI sensors working?

This article applies as of PRTG Network Monitor 13

Monitoring via WMI: Common Problems and Solution Guide

PRTG users often complain about problems and errors when monitoring their systems with PRTG’s Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) sensors. However, if you encounter issues with WMI sensors, please keep in mind that in most cases WMI errors are the result of a not properly working WMI configuration or WMI installation.


In order to get your WMI monitoring working or in the case of single sensor errors, follow this guide:

1. Check the basics

Get familiar with WMI technology. In case of problems with WMI, we strongly recommend you go through the following knowledge base article and explicitly check that your configuration meets the basic requirements:

If your WMI sensors show WMI error PE263 after updating to PRTG 17.1.28.1341 (or later), please see this article:

2. Check the WMI connection

If your system meets the requirements as given in the article above and WMI monitoring still does not work, test the connectivity and availability of the corresponding WMI counters. Run our WMI Tester on the same machine that runs the PRTG probe that has the malfunctioning WMI sensors:

3. Solutions for the most common WMI errors

If you cannot get a WMI connection with the WMI Tester, please check our list of the most common WMI errors and possible solutions, especially if you encounter errors in the 800xxxxx range:

4. The Repair List

If you have tried all the approaches as outlined in the articles above and your WMI sensors still fail, please see the following article that has many of the common repair procedures. Please note that the options in this article are not trivial so we strongly recommend you to try out the tips above first.