This article applies to PRTG Network Monitor 16 or later

Considerations for Port Monitoring

Network hubs, switches, and bridges are (among others) integral parts in every kind of network. As the network size grows, also the number of possibly monitorable ports increases, most devices being multiport devices. This is why you might well ask if you should really create one PRTG sensor per port in your network.

Because networks can be arranged in many different ways and admins may want to focus on different devices or network parts, it is hard to give one valuable solution for all possible scenarios.

However, you can take the following points as an advice for your network monitoring setup.

Which Ports Should I Monitor?

• If your device is a core network component, create one active sensor per port. This allows you to always be up to date, to be informed without loss of time, to save your network data and to run reports for evaluation.
• Generally, it is a good idea to always monitor active ports as well as CPU and memory of your device.
• If your device is a minor network component, you can choose to not monitor actively every single port of your device. In this case, you can work with paused sensors.

Port Monitoring Possibilities

There are various PRTG Network Monitor sensors available to monitor ports. When it comes to traffic monitoring, various technologies are available. Please see this Comparison of bandwidth monitoring technologies first. It takes into account bandwidth monitoring via

• WMI,
• SNMP,
• Packet Sniffing, and
• Flows including IPFix, NetFlow, sFLow and jFlow.

If you already know what you need, check the available sensor types right away!

More

• Knowledge Base: Which ports does PRTG use on my system?
• Have you ever wished to get your network traffic data not only monitored, but also condensed in a nice report? PRTG can create reports of your monitoring data! This is the way to go step by step.