This article applies to PRTG Network Monitor 12 or later, as well as to previous (deprecated) versions

Preliminaries

First and foremost, change the default administrator login credentials (prtgadmin / prtgadmin). All PRTG installations use this default configuration and your installation will never be secure if you continue to use these settings.

If possible, use HTTPS for access to the PRTG web servers. This is controlled using the "PRTG Server Administrator" that can be found under the “Start” menu. The default SSL certificate included with PRTG’s web server is completely secure but causes web browsers to show a warning notification because it does not match the respective server’s DNS name. To avoid this you must purchase your own SSL certificate and install it on your PRTG system. See How can I use a trusted SSL certificate with the PRTG web interface? for more details.

If you intend to distribute URLs from your PRTG installation, make sure that your DNS, firewall and NAT settings allow others to access the web server (port 80 or 443 for SSL) from the outside world.

Solution: Using the “Read Only User” Feature

Another popular option is to create a user account that has read-only rights. You can specify exactly which objects the public user can view.

• Pros: Public users can drill into the data and the sensor type. Users can thus also view reports and maps.
• Cons: Larger configuration effort required. PRTG’s user interface cannot be skinned as easily as maps.

“Read Only Users” are best suited for situations where others need detailed access to data from PRTG and for access to reports.

What you need to do:

1. Create a new user account (e.g. “Public User”) that will be used for public access.
2. Under the heading Account Control are two important settings: Set the Account Type to Read Only User. This setting ensures that nobody can use the public login to modify your monitoring setup.
3. Choose Create a new user group for this user in the drop-down menu for the Primary Group. This new user group will be used in the settings of the various objects (groups, devices, sensors, maps, reports) to control whether the public user may see an object or not.
4. After creating the new user, select the objects in the device tree the user may view by going to these objects’ settings pages and defining the access right for the newly created group to Read.
5. Remember that these rights are inherited to child objects, i.e. allowing the public user to “read” a device automatically allows the user to see all the device’s sensors too.
6. Optional: The PRTG web pages can be adjusted (e.g. to match a corporate design) by editing the respective templates (HTML / CSS experience necessary)
7. Finally, provide your users with PRTG Network Monitor access using the usual URL and the credentials set above to log in.

See Also

PRTG Manual: User Access Rights

This article applies to PRTG Network Monitor 12 or later, as well as to previous (deprecated) versions

Preliminaries

First and foremost, change the default administrator login credentials (prtgadmin / prtgadmin). All PRTG installations use this default configuration and your installation will never be secure if you continue to use these settings.

If possible, use HTTPS for access to the PRTG web servers. This is controlled using the "PRTG Server Administrator" that can be found under the “Start” menu. The default SSL certificate included with PRTG’s web server is completely secure but causes web browsers to show a warning notification because it does not match the respective server’s DNS name. To avoid this you must purchase your own SSL certificate and install it on your PRTG system. See How can I use a trusted SSL certificate with the PRTG web interface? for more details.

If you intend to distribute URLs from your PRTG installation, make sure that your DNS, firewall and NAT settings allow others to access the web server (port 80 or 443 for SSL) from the outside world.

Solution: Direct Linking

You can link directly to specific graphs via the PRTG API and providing the necessary parameters, such as width and height. In such an instance, however, you would need to provide the login data within the URL.

To call a graph directly via the PRTG API, provide a URL like the following:

http://SERVERNAME/chart.png?type=graph&width=300&height=160&graphid=2&id=0&username=xyz&password=xyz

Add a ”username” and “password”/"passhash" parameter to the end of the URL for authentication. You shoud use the credentials of an unprivileged user, like a read-only user!

For details about how to use and available parameters, please see PRTG Manual: Live Graphs.

More

Please see also How can I use graphs from PRTG in other web pages?