This article shows how to monitor servers and their environment with PRTG Network Monitor. In order to prevent devices from damage caused by external factors, we use several hardware sensors with PRTG.
With about 200 sensor types, PRTG can obtain many different measurements from the devices in your network, including uptime, bandwidth usage, and performance values. Additionally, in order to avoid system failures, you can easily monitor servers and other devices to avoid system errors due to overheating and similar health factors. In PRTG there are already some System Health sensors available for monitoring various hardware device types, including Cisco devices, Dell PowerEdge servers, HP ProLiant servers, NetApp systems, and IDE disk drives.
With these sensor types you can monitor, for example, the current temperature of a device, its thermal status, cooling status, fan status, and many more, depending on the available measurement components.
Furthermore, it is possible to closely monitor environmental factors.
With specific SNMP-enabled hardware sensors in combination with PRTG you can even monitor factors like temperature of environment, humidity, water leaks and floods, fire and smoke, brightness, open and closed doors or windows, as well as other potentially harmful data center conditions.
Following are listed some hardware devices for environmental monitoring which we have tested successfully in our labs-as demonstrated on the pictures:
And here is how environmental monitoring looks like in PRTG:
For this resulting graph, PRTG can monitor a sensor like the following one:
For detailed information about how environmental monitoring works with PRTG, please see this article in the Knowledge Base.
PRTG gives you an overview of your entire network, including devices and direct infrastructure, in addition to application servers and the performance statistics of these. Whenever a service is not reachable, or thresholds are breached, you can be alerted immediately. And if you do not hear anything from PRTG, no news is good news and the network should be running perfectly.
Curious? Start monitoring your network immediately and download your free trial version of PRTG today!
