It was at the end of October when we released our PRTG Network Monitor Release 20.4.63 as a stable release. Some of you are probably already working with the latest version, all others can't wait to click on "update" after this article. :) But first things first.
After the last two versions (20.3.61 and 20.3.62) already contained 11 new sensors, the current release comes with 5 brand-new sensor types. Besides the first native sensor for monitoring Microsoft Azure, this time we mainly cover the field of Industrial IT. These are the new sensors of 20.4.63:
Since we released no fewer than four new Dell sensors within the last two versions, the new Dell EMC Unity VMware Datastore v2 sensor completes the Dell sensor package. The sensor monitors a VMware datastore on a Dell EMC Unity storage system and shows the free space of a VMware datastore, as well as the number of hosts, virtual machines, and virtual drives.
The Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine sensor is the first new native sensor type in a series of Azure sensors that will follow in the next versions. It monitors the status of a virtual machine in a Microsoft Azure subscription, as well as CPU usage and used and remaining CPU credits. You can use this, for example, to act before your credits run out and your virtual machines within your Azure environment stop.
This is the first of the three sensors in this release that opens the doors to Industrial IT monitoring. The new Modbus TCP Custom sensor monitors values that a Modbus TCP server returns. With this new sensor type, you can keep an eye on your peripheral equipment such as cooling units, power supply, backup generators, and temperature.
Modbus is a data communications protocol originally published in 1979 for use with its programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Modbus has become a standard communication protocol and is now a commonly available means of connecting industrial electronic devices. If you are interested in more details, I recommend you to check out Michael's article Introducing the new Modbus TCP sensor for PRTG.
The next sensor in the series of our Industrial IT solution is the OPC UA Server Status sensor. The sensor monitors status, uptime, and diagnostic information of an OPC UA server and will help you to ensure your devices are available using OPC UA and your production processes run flawlessly.
OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is an open standard that specifies information exchange for industrial communication. Particularly on devices inside machines, between machines and from machines to systems in a convergence of IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology). Michael also wrote a blog article on OPC UA and more details about this sensor. So don't miss having a look at the article Introducing the new OPC UA sensors for monitoring industrial devices.
The new Soffico Orchestra Channel Health sensor monitors the availability of the Soffico Orchestra API and shows the status and overall number of successful and failed channel calls.
More details about how PRTG Network Monitor enables us to monitor Soffico Orchestra environments, not only in industrial environments, but also in the healthcare sector, will be available soon on our blog.
Aside from that, we also fixed 34 bugs, implemented 18 feature and story tickets, and finished 34 tasks and to-dos with PRTG release 20.4.63. Find all the details on our release notes page.
We also offer a public roadmap of PRTG on our website. There you can read at any time about which features we are currently working on and what kinds of things we want to implement in PRTG in the future.