I am trying to figure out what kind of performance we need for every remote probe we need to use. We are running mostly Windows server so i am mostly stuck to WMI and Performance Counter sensors. According to your documentation (https://www.paessler.com/manuals/prtg/system_requirements.htm) I see that using a lot of WMI sensors is not reccommended, but i can't find information about Performance Counter sensors. What is exactly the difference between these 2? Is the use of Performance Counters a better solution for Windows Servers? Or is there maybe another solution?

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Performance counter sensors, in terms of resources usage, are far better than WMI sensors. Also another alternative would be to use SNMP but we do not suggest this as we have had issues with Windows changing the indexes on the OIDs and they are no longer monitorable after that. You can purchase software like SNMP Informant that will help with monitoring through SNMP but Performance Counters would work better without software. Another note to this though is that monitoring Perf Counters is only possible when the PRTG server and the Target server are running 2008 and above.


Feb, 2014 - Permalink

That is good to hear. Most of our servers run Windows 2008 R2 of 2012 (R2) so this won't be a problem. In a test environment I already see that Performance Counters work on our servers.

Do you also have any numbers I can work with? For example, on the system requirements page (https://www.paessler.com/manuals/prtg/system_requirements.htm) it shows that it is recommended to stay below 120 WMI sensors with a 1 minute interval on a probe. How many sensors do you recommend when Performance Counters are used?


Feb, 2014 - Permalink

This is a pretty good question. We haven't done "complete tests", as there are so many factors that need to be considered, but our observations so far were, that performance counters are more robust and you can add more Performance Counter sensors than WMI sensors. Adding 10 times more sensors, will probably still not be a really good idea, but adding two or three times as many is probably possible.


Feb, 2014 - Permalink