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monitor remote SMB share availability from a device?

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I would like to be able to monitor the availability of a network share from one of my monitored servers.

What I would like to do is make sure that my Windows VM, server-a.domain.net, hasn't lost connectivity to a shared folder on another device on my network,
fileserver.domain.net\bin\

I have found the "Folder" sensor type, but it does not appear to do what I want. The "Folder" sensor's documentation states: "If the folder is located on a network device, use the UNC path without the computer name. The computer name will be inherited from the parent device of this sensor."

Does PRTG not offer a way to monitor that one device is able to access a shared folder (or file, for that matter) on another device?

folder folder-sensor network-share share smb

Created on Oct 22, 2018 9:58:35 PM



3 Replies

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Hi Ariehm,

Thank you for your message.

With PRTG all monitoring requests are executed by the probes. Thus also the requests if shares are available in the network, are executed from the probe's IP address.

To test the availability of a share from that particular server, you would need to install a remote probe on that server. This ensures that the requests also stems from that server.

Does that help?

Kind regards,
Andreas Günther
Tech Support, Paessler AG

Created on Oct 23, 2018 10:39:37 AM by Andreas Günther [Paessler Support]



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Thank you, that does conclusively answer the question. However, the solution is not ideal, because we are trying to monitor network share availability from specific vm's and alarm if any of them loses connectivity. Putting such a sensor on a single-purpose probe instead of the vm's wouldn't give us that information.

On a related question, does Paessler have any plans to add remote Powershell sensors to remotely execute scripts on a Windows target, to provide functionality on par with the "SSH Script" sensor, i.e., to run a remote script and then returns a numerical value?

Created on Oct 25, 2018 6:40:05 PM



Votes:

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Hi there,

Another idea would be to add the sensor on multiple remote probes (only makes sense if you already have a bunch) and aggregate an "overall" availability with our Business Process Sensor:
https://www.paessler.com/manuals/prtg/business_process_sensor

For example the Windows Update sensor uses a Remote Powershell session to execute a PS command. However with the newer versions of Windows, it gets harder to obtain information this way. So there are no plans for further sensors using this technology as of now I'm afraid.

Kind regards,
Andreas Günther
Tech Support, Paessler AG

Created on Oct 26, 2018 6:52:04 AM by Andreas Günther [Paessler Support]




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