What is this?

This knowledgebase contains questions and answers about PRTG Network Monitor and network monitoring in general.

Learn more

PRTG Network Monitor

Intuitive to Use. Easy to manage.
More than 500,000 users rely on Paessler PRTG every day. Find out how you can reduce cost, increase QoS and ease planning, as well.

Free Download

Top Tags


View all Tags

What Creates Channels?

Votes:

0

Hello all,

Got a newb question here, but I'm thoroughly confused over how channels get created when adding sensors. Specifically, I'm having a problem with Cloud HTTP sensors.

When I go to add a new Cloud HTTP sensor, there is no option for which channels get created. But some of my sensors have been created with 6 channels, others 8, and others still have 10. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

My organization has region-blocking in place, so I only want to monitor these from the US West and US East regions (both by Response Time and Response Code). So, along with the Downtime and Global Average channels, that would be a total of 6 sensors. And that's what I got on a few of the ones I created, but others also had the EU and/or Asia regions, which I don't want.

I can't find a way to remove channels... indeed, it sounds like that's not possible. Which I have no idea why this capability wouldn't be available (seems pretty basic to add/remove a channel), but I digress.

So, since I can't figure out what is causing the sensors to get some channels and not others, I tried cloning the sensors with just the 6 channels I wanted. That has not always worked. Let me repeat that: I CLONE A SENSOR WITH 6 CHANNELS AND SOMETIMES, BUT NOT ALWAYS, IT WILL CREATE A SENSOR WITH 8 OR 10 CHANNELS. That makes NO sense to me. Why is this happening?

Would someone kindly enlighten me as to the following:

  • How do I control which channels get added to a sensor
  • Is it possible to add/remove channels from an existing sensor? If so, how?
  • How is it that if I clone a sensor the resulting channels differ from the one being cloned?

Please help.

channels cloud-http

Created on Aug 30, 2018 4:04:09 PM

Last change on Aug 31, 2018 10:05:06 AM by Stephan Linke [Paessler Support]



3 Replies

Votes:

0

How do I control which channels get added to a sensor
Not at all, we're using various AWS instances around the globe to ping the corresponding target.

Is it possible to add/remove channels from an existing sensor? If so, how?
You could only hide the channels from graph/table via their channel settings, basically disengaging them, i.e. they won't cause further alerts if down.

How is it that if I clone a sensor the resulting channels differ from the one being cloned?
A cloned sensor always has the same sensors as the source sensor, but if an AWS instances has not yet responded at the point of cloning, additional channels may appear. That said, what AWS instances do you see within the channel?

Kind regards,
Stephan Linke, Tech Support Team

Created on Aug 31, 2018 1:06:18 PM by Stephan Linke [Paessler Support]

Last change on Aug 31, 2018 1:06:33 PM by Stephan Linke [Paessler Support]



Votes:

0

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for the reply.

OK, so I can't control which channels get added, nor can I add/remove channels.

I still don't understand why some of my sensors are showing up with varying channels. It's been a day and they are still inconsistencies.

For example:

One sensor has Downtime, Global Average, US East Response Time, US East Response Code US West Response Time, and US West Response Code.

Another sensor is showing all of those, plus the Response Time and Response Code channels for EU West.

Another Sensor is showing EU West and also Asia Pacific...

I initially thought, based on what you had said about channels showing up once different AWS instances respond, that perhaps it was due to our region-blocking (that channels for blocked regions were never appearing because there was no response). But no. I checked that, and that's not the case. There's no pattern to it.

In fact, I have sensors monitoring the SAME web site (via different DNS host names) and different channels are showing up.

Created on Aug 31, 2018 2:28:04 PM



Votes:

0

Hi Leo,

Please send us over a ticket via [email protected] and in that ticket let us know what your license key is, put some screenshots of the sensors with their settings and we can take it from there. With that info I should be able to look into our cloud sensor system and see what is going on.

Created on Sep 10, 2018 7:42:57 AM by Greg Campion [Paessler Support]




Disclaimer: The information in the Paessler Knowledge Base comes without warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk. Before applying any instructions please exercise proper system administrator housekeeping. You must make sure that a proper backup of all your data is available.