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Is there a way to reduce ping time when devices are down.

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I have been looking at ways to speed up our PRTG, I saw a recommendation that advised you raise the ping times on the devices from 30 seconds to 5 minutes to help with load and data volume.

Unfortunately we are unable to do this, however my question is that as we have a lot of devices that go up and down on a daily basis is there a way of raising the ping time automatically once the device is seen as down.

For example: Said device is pinging every 30 seconds. It is then taken off line and goes "down" the ping time then automatically raises to 5 - 10 minute intervals to reduce the monitoring load and data volume (as seen below taken from your FAQ's) when the device is then acknowledged as being up again normal 30 second ping times resumes.

("Use Longer Intervals You can reduce monitoring load and data volume by 80 % if you switch the monitoring interval of all of your sensors from 1 minute to 5 minute intervals. Hint: Change the interval in the Root group settings and use PRTG's inheritance mechanism to use this interval for all objects that are below in the object hierarchy.")

I thought there may be a work around with the acknowledge down feature but if my understanding is correct it will still ping the device therefore not reducing the load? Please correct me if i'm wrong.

I would really appreciate any assistance with this.

Thanks Don.

device down ping

Created on Mar 6, 2018 9:59:35 AM



3 Replies

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Dear DonHarris,

with the down or acknowledged down, the interval keeps unchanged, that is correct. PRTG has no function to slow down the scanning on error. On of the reasons is that the graphing and report engine of PRTG works best with a constant scanning interval for the time frame shown. Another reason is that such feature required additional options but would overall see little use. We want to keep the number of available options the minimum necessary, in order to keep PRTG clean and allow to learn in quickly.

If your PRTG gets slow, an occasional lowered scanning interval would not help much anyway. PRTG's performance benefits more from using longer intervals overall, or less sensors, or more powerful hardware. Additional speed-up options include the removal of unused sensor libraries, and reports, and user groups, and perhaps enabling the web interface speed mode.

Created on Mar 6, 2018 2:26:44 PM by Arne Seifert [Paessler Support]



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Thanks for your reply,

Due to the nature of the business we cannot enable any web features unfortunately. Also it would not really be occasional lowered scans as we monitor thousands of devices probably 50% of which are down at any one time, this is why I thought it may make a difference to performance if around 5000 pings were not happening every 30-60 seconds when the devices are down.

Is there any way of implementing an automatic pause to occur when a device goes down? As I know that you can determine how long the pause interval lasts. So for example a device goes down, it will automatically pause and then check again in 15 minutes if it is up, if not it will remain paused. Perhaps that could be a work around?

Again your help is much appreciated.

Thanks Don

Created on Mar 6, 2018 2:39:52 PM



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Dear Don,

such feature is not available in PRTG. In principle, you could implement it yourself, using a notification which performs an HTTP action, which is used to perform an API call which pauses a sensor for 15 minutes. The API call in question would be

<your_webserver_address>/api/pauseobjectfor.htm?id=%sensorid&pausemsg=Paused%20by%20API%20call&duration=15&username=<a_PRTG_user_allowed_to_do_this>&passhash=<the_passhash_for this_user>

Fields in <brackets> mark placeholders you have to replace yourself. %sensorid is a placeholder which should be automatically resolved by the PRTG notification.

However, if your PRTG server is already experiencing performance issues, the added load caused by this notification and API call could lead to more performance issues than you gain performance.

Created on Mar 6, 2018 3:56:24 PM by Arne Seifert [Paessler Support]




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