How to Set Up Reports in PRTG in 5 Easy Steps

Published by Sascha Neumeier
Last updated on March 03, 2022 • 7 minute read

Your PRTG is up and running. You’ve built a flawless device tree with everything perfectly organized in accordance with your network hierarchy. You’re getting email, SMS and push notifications when things are down or problematic.

But now the CIO wants regular reports about the uptime and availability of a critical application or service you provide to end users. The CIO will be sharing these reports with the rest of the executive team, so you need to keep it “high level”. Where do you start?

how to set up reports in prtg in 5 easy steps

Benefits of Reporting with PRTG

PRTG can create (and/or store) daily/weekly/monthly/annual reports for selected sensors.
You can configure the reports to be sent to you via email in PDFs or have them stored on the hard-drive.
Additionally, you can run a report interactively in the web browser (in HTML format).
You can also have the reports generated on a schedule, e.g. every Monday.
There are various templates available which include different sets of data tables and graphs. Check the PRTG features and the Manual.

Step 1 - Basic Report Settings

From the PRTG main menu, choose Report | Add Report.

First, decide what your data set is and how you want to present that to the one reading the report.

What devices and sensors will be included and what template do you need? In this scenario, List of sensors or the Graph Only templates would be good choices as these templates provide a simple view that is easy to read and interpret.

Step 2 - Setting a Schedule

Pick your sensors by tag (if applicable), set a schedule and recipients.

In this scenario we are going to use the WMI and SNMP uptime sensor tags which are predefined within PRTG for any Windows System Uptime or SNMP System Uptime sensor. You can also make use of your own custom tags if necessary.

Step 3 - Define Report Period

The next step is to define your report period, percentiles and data files that will be included with your report.

The main advantage of using percentiles is that unusually high values are not included into the averaging calculations. This means that statistics include more relevant data. In the example of the 95th-percentile, 5% of the highest measured values are discarded for the statistical report.

Step 4 - Manual Selection of Sensors

Manually select sensors that you want to add to the report whether that includes sensors added by tags or whether you are creating a report from scratch.

You can search for specific sensors or keywords in the search box on the top-right corner of the device tree. Use drag-and-drop to add sensors to your report on the left.

If you select sensors manually, you have the option to focus on specific sensor channels that will keep the report limited to just those statistics in question.

Just add or remove check marks next to the names of the respective sensor channels.

Step 5 - Create Report

Now you can start creating the actual report. On the Run Now tab (1), select a time period (2) that the report will cover, and a file format.

Then click Run Report (3) and wait till your report has been created. That’s it!

The result could be a monthly uptime report that looks something like this:

06_final-report

If you would like to experience more detailed step-by-step instructions for PRTG, visit our How-To pages on the website. There you will find a variety of guides and learn how to get the most out of PRTG. And best of all, the guides are updated regularly.

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