Any chance you could give your browser agent some custom high number? It makes it easier to filter under GA. Otherwise we will have to implement GA tags which is too much hassle.

Just as a not Site247 provides simple how-to which just works:

Log in to google.com/analytics and navigate to Admin > All Filters > New Filter and configure the following details.

Filter Name: Robot Traffic Site24x7 Filter Type : Custom Filter and select Exclude Filter Field : Browser Version Filter Pattern: \.247$

Thanks Tom

Hi Tom,

Do we understand you correctly that you want the user agent to be replaced with a number, for example, 8238948892934? Sorry but this would not be a good approach because users would not be able to know who exactly does the request.

But it is possible to filter for bots in Google analytics: Introducing Bot and Spider Filtering

Google's recommendation is to filter for user agents with RegEx. So .*PRTGCloudBot.* should filter the PRTGCloudBot from GA.

Regards,

Hi,

We use country blocking on our firewall for regions we know we don't need traffic from, but because you inexplicably don't allow us to delete or even disable channels of a sensor, it means both the Cloud HTTP and Ping sensor fails for Asia (which we block).

I light that I cannot prevent the sensor from using Asia or ignoring its result (unless I am missing a trick) can you provide us the IPs or at least a DNS Host Group FQDN that includes all the servers involved in conducting the test? Then I can whitelist them on our firewall and allow the checks to get through. I've added the ones I can see blocked and the sensor goes green for a shot while but then it turns yellow again, and so far it's a never ending task of looking for each one in the logs and adding an exception. And then there's no guarantee that you won't add more or remove some later on down the line.

Cheers, Fernando

Ferando, thank you very much for your feedback on this. We will put this on the wish list though, and I did count your vote for this. We need to see if we can use the developer time to implement things, which were more often requested (and where as many users as possible benefit from). Your vote is counted nevertheless of course! Please bear with us.

Thanks, but while waiting for a "possible" change which may never come, can we have the list of IPs or better still a DNS Host Group FQDN that includes all the servers? Then I can at least start using these sensors again.

You can get to the IP Ranges by filtering the following JSON - File:

https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

for

service == AMAZON

region == ap-northeast-1

Be aware of the possible performance implications for your firewall though.

I'd like to echo Fernando's sentiment earlier in the comments. Having a way to select which PRTG cloud locations are used would be very helpful.

Identify your region from AWS List of Regions then use the following PowerShell script to retrieve the subnets:

# Retrieve a current list of subnets

$job = Start-Job -ScriptBlock {Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json"}
$output = Receive-Job -Job $job -Wait
$webData = $output.content | ConvertFrom-Json
$subnets = $webData.prefixes | where-object {($_.region -match 'ap-southeast-2') -and ($_.service -eq 'AMAZON')}

Write-Host 'These are the region subnets:'
$subnets |FT

Please register your bot with Cloudflare as a "friendly bot", they are currently blocking it in their Bot Management solution.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/friendly-bots/
https://forms.gle/dT9muX2aYRqFokkc8

I've noticed that the cloud bot's user agent appears to have recently (11th Jan 2023?) changed to:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PaesslerCloudBot/1.0; https://www.paessler.com; ping-http#[licensehash]

...no mention of "PRTG" in the User Agent string anymore!

Plus the presence of the "; ping" phrase in the string plays havoc with some hosting provider's own enforced ModSec rules, blocking connections and serving 406 errors.

Please can we revert back to the "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PRTGCloudBot/1.0; +https://www.paessler.com/prtgcloudbot; for_[licensehash])" UA string?

An example is InMotion hosting, who's custom enforced ModSec "Rule ID: 959006: System Command Injection" is triggered by the "; ping" phrase in the UA string.

Hi GreatMarko,

I've just updated the backend so that the word ping or http doesn't show up anymore in that string. I hope this solves that problem.

I also wanted to mention that PRTG was dropped from the User Agent since we don't just use this service for PRTG but also for other services and we decided to use the company name instead.

That's great! Thanks Greg!