This article applies to PRTG Network Monitor 17 or later

Monitoring Environmental Values

With PRTG Network Monitor you can set up sensors that constantly monitor the availability and performance of important servers and other equipment in the server room.

Furthermore, it is possible to closely monitor environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. Environmental monitoring is an important issue to protect your equipment from damage that is caused by high temperatures, humidity, or other external influences. If something uncommon is detected, PRTG can notify you in several ways (please see PRTG Manual: Notifications).

An extensive monitoring takes place on two levels: On the one hand, you can obtain measurements directly from the servers and on the other hand, you should also consider environmental values measured in your server room.

Monitoring Servers

With more than 200 sensor types, PRTG can obtain many different measurements from the devices in your network, including uptime, bandwidth usage, and performance values.

Additionally, in order to avoid system failures, you can easily monitor servers and other devices to avoid system errors due to overheating and similar health factors. In PRTG there are already some System Health sensors available for various device types, including the following:

• SNMP Cisco System Health Sensor
• SNMP Dell PowerEdge System Health Sensor
• SNMP HP ProLiant System Health Sensor
• SNMP NetApp System Health Sensor
• WMI HDD Health Sensor

With these sensor types you can monitor, for example, the current temperature of a device, its thermal status, cooling status, fan status, and much more, depending on the available measurement components. For this concern, PRTG uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to get these values.

Monitoring Servers – Steps to Go

You can monitor the system health of your servers the following way:

• Add the desired device, for example, your HP ProLiant server, to PRTG (for example, via the button Add Device on a group’s details page).
• Then add a corresponding System Health sensor to this device (for example, via Add Sensor on the device’s details page).
• The channels showing the desired information will be created automatically at runtime, depending on the available measurements reported by your devices, for example, temperatures.

PRTG will begin to monitor the selected device a few seconds later. With PRTG’s pre-defined limits, for example, for temperatures, you will get warnings immediately if a critical threshold is breached. Of course, you can set limits according to your preferences.

Monitoring the Server Room or Data Center

It is not only possible to monitor a server itself. There are also a lot of environmental monitoring possibilities out there. With specific SNMP-enabled hardware sensors in combination with PRTG you can even monitor factors like temperature of environment, humidity, water leaks and floods, fire and smoke, brightness, open and closed doors or windows, as well as other potentially harmful data center conditions. In general, they all work the same way together with PRTG: using SNMP.

Please see below for a selection of hardware devices for environmental monitoring:

• Jacarta
• Kentix (see also this guide by Kentix about integrating it into PRTG)
• Netatmo
• Querx WLAN TH (see also: German tutorial for Querx and PRTG)
• Poseidon
• MessPC (see also this article)
• APC

All of these vendors offer physical sensors that can provide data about their environment. Connected to some kind of SNMP-enabled “management box” these sensors become network-enabled.

The manufacturers usually provide Management Information Base (MIB) files for their devices. Basically, a MIB is a text file defining all searchable SNMP objects of a certain device. It includes at least one Object Identifier (OID) defining an unique address and name, and gives further information on the respective object. With our MIB Importer you can import the MIBs of the measurement devices into PRTG.

Monitoring Server Room – Steps to Go

To use one of the devices listed above for environmental monitoring with PRTG, do the following:

• Make sure you have converted the needed MIB files to .oidlib files and saved them in the snmplibs subfolder of your PRTG program directory

In the context menu of a group or probe, choose Add Device… to add a device to PRTG that represents your measurement device:

• Type in a suitable name (like PCMessure) and use the device’s IP address in the settings. You can leave the other settings unchanged.
• Then click Add Sensor on the device’s details page and select the sensor SNMP Library (to find it more easily, filter for SNMP as used technology) with Add This.
• A popup will appear where available library files are listed. Choose the library that you have created from the MIB and confirm with Ok.
• Then choose the sensors you want to monitor by clicking on the corresponding check boxes and confirm your selection. PRTG will usually create several sensors, one for each individual OID.

Now you are able to monitor the environment of your devices, for example, in your server room. PRTG will start to monitor the sensors of your measurement device immediately and will alert you if it is necessary.

See Also

• Monitoring Environmental Values (blog article)
• Monitoring via SNMP (information about the SNMP technology)
• Monitoring via WMI (information about the WMI technology)
• Environment Monitoring with PRTG (general information and tested devices)
• Using PCMessure Ethernet Box with PRTG Network Monitor (detailed use case with PRTG 7)
• HP ProLiant System Health Sensors (required software)
• Requirements for Monitoring Dell Servers (required tool)
• How can I send SMS text notifications using Kentix AlarmManager-PRO with PRTG? (step-by-step instructions)