Hello Paessler Team,

In the future, please consider allowing all flow sensors to work off one external channel definition file. (similar to the way you can add a value lookup for other sensors.) Inside that file it would be nice if the colour of the channel can be defined as well, instead of having to choose the colour for the edit channel settings dialog for each channel of each netflow.

Since you could then have all netflows standardized, it would be nice if we could a map object similar to "Live Graph (No Labels)" but with axis labels and no legend. This way we only need to enable the legend on one sensor which would save space.

Currently my organization maintains over 25 netflows all showing similar information for different connections. Each time we add a channel definition it is a lot of work to go in an add it to all the netflows.

Additionally last time I checked, you could not remove a channel from a flow sensor without deleting the sensor and re-creating it. That functionality would be nice as well.

Thanks for taking the time to consider my suggestions!

Article Comments

Dear Chris

Thank you for your feedback. Please allow me to comment why I ask you to not expect these feature requests to be implemented in the foreseeable future.

Instead of having a user work with definition files, we rather would look how we could improve the interface to allow such configuration. Some sensor settings can be easily edited in bulk via multi-edit, while other settings have to be done one by one.

PRTG uses its own database format, which is optimized for performance. This performance comes with some side-effects. Channels can be hidden, but not deleted.

That being said, we recognize the requests of our users to change settings without having to use the UI. We are looking for a good, general solution instead of adding the support of definition files.


Nov, 2015 - Permalink

Hi Arne,

Thank you for pointing out the Multi-Edit functionality to me. This looks like it will do what I want as far as being able to edit multiple sensors and multiple channels at once! I apologize for not reading the manual thoroughly enough.

Please still consider my suggestion for a map view object that includes axis labeling but no legend. For now I realized I could create this effect by myself by layering "White box with black border" objects underneath my Graphs to give them an opaque background, which then allows me to cover the legend of the chart that above it, but this is rather little clumsy and takes extra time to manage.

Thanks for your reply.


Nov, 2015 - Permalink

Dear Chris

We are careful to add any new map objects. If we have too many, the object menu gets too complex.

Originally, we just wanted to offer custom arrangements of tables and graphs. PRTG users began to 'abuse' the map editor for really sophisticated displays and quickly noticed the limitations of the map editor.

Instead of adding new objects, we rather like to focus on usability improvements and hope that more users will find it easier to create custom maps.


Nov, 2015 - Permalink