This article applies as of PRTG 22


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

Planning large installations of PRTG

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

  • SNMP v1/v2c, Ping, Port, and HTTP are the recommended types of sensors 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.
  • For WMI monitoring, try to keep the number of WMI sensors per probe below 120 (with a 60-second scanning interval) or 600 (with a 300-second scanning interval).
  • For flow (NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow) monitoring, the maximum number of sensors depends on the traffic pattern, the number of flow packets received by the probe per second, 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, use a dedicated remote probe.
  • 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, distribute the sensors over multiple remote probes.

As a rule of thumb, you should not experience any performance issues 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 the high-speed operation of the PRTG web interface (page loading 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 system, or if you want to set up more than 5,000 sensors 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: 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: System Requirements.


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Disclaimer:
The information in the Paessler Knowledge Base comes without warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk. Before applying any instructions please exercise proper system administrator housekeeping. You must make sure that a proper backup of all your data is available.