Is it possible to disable the device renaming during auto-discover?

This is a very frustrating 'feature'.

Every device manually created has to be renamed again after auto-discovery, then potentially again in the future if it's scanned again.

The problem is we have application servers with multiple DNS entries for each service or site, PRTG just seems to pick one at random and assign it as the device name.

Article Comments

It's not possible to disable this "feature". The devices should only be renamed once, after the initial auto discovery. After that, you can rename them manually and they should stay like that despite the auto discovery being run.


Feb, 2017 - Permalink

"It's not possible"? This is a very unsatisfactory answer. Auto discovery should not "discover" a device's name if it already has a name. I know this topic is a year old but I see no useful answer to it. It's a highly irritating "feature" and I would like to turn it off.


Mar, 2019 - Permalink

Then you'll need to disable the auto discovery on a the group level and configure it at the device level instead :)

PRTGapi | Feature Requests | WMI Issues | SNMP Issues

Kind regards,
Stephan Linke, Tech Support Team


Mar, 2019 - Permalink

I'd also like to chime in over a year later - this would be extremely useful to be able to turn off. If I'm adding a device and giving it a name, PRTG shouldn't over write that name with whatever it finds - I've given it the name I want already. I don't want it to put my name in brackets after the device's IP address. If I did, guess what - that's what I'd have put in the name field!

It's a minor thing, but it adds an unnecessary step to configuring new devices. It makes no sense to have to name a device two times to get it how I want it. If you're saying we'd have to disable auto-discover to get the desired behaviour, that means adding device sensors manually just so I can keep the name I chose. That's not a solution, that's a workaround.

Please at least give us the option to turn this off properly.


Oct, 2020 - Permalink

Hi Matt,

I understand your pain, although four replies in three years, including little complaints about this in our helpdesk are not making it easy to increase priority on this one.

@Matt I took the freedom to include your description into the actual feature request:

Disable Device renaming on Auto Discovery-enabled Groups

Please, feel free to upvote the same. If enough people want this, according to the upvotes, we'll see what we can do here.


Oct, 2020 - Permalink

I'll go ahead and add a reply and upvote the feature request. Its very laborious and quite irritating to have to rename a device each time an auto discovery runs.


Jan, 2021 - Permalink