Paessler Blog - All about IT, Monitoring, and PRTG

News from the PRTG Community

Written by Dirk Paessler | Aug 3, 2010

Enabling its users to write their own custom sensors, PRTG offers a powerful option to extend existing network monitoring to make it even more convenient. Although PRTG offers out-of-the-box monitoring for a huge variety of devices and systems, sometimes system administrators have special requirements in very specific setups. These can be met using own script or EXE files that can be easily integrated in the central monitoring solution.

Sensors at Google Code Project

At a Google Code Project Hosting website for PRTG7 Add-ons, users share their home-made scripts and EXE files that can be used as PRTG sensors. For example, one of our most active users, Gerard Feijth, released several custom sensors during the last months, all implementing features which users had asked for in the Paessler Knowledge Base:

  • LastWinUpdate: This program gets the last date when Windows update was run on a specific computer in the network. It gives back the number of days, which can be used to alert the administrator when a computer was not updated for a certain time.
  • WinOSVersion: This sensor shows the Windows version of a computer in the network. This can e.g. be used for inventory purposes.
  • SSLCertExpiration: Monitors the SSL certificate of a website and returns the number of days before it expires. In combination with a threshold notification trigger, this value can also be used to alert the administrator a few days before a certificate will finally expire.
  • IPonDNSBL: Queries DNS black lists and checks if a certain IP address is listed there. The administrator can thus continuously check and be immediately alerted if the company’s IP address should be black listed. This is a nice feature, as usually the major part of a company’s outgoing emails will not reach the recipients as long as the sender IP is on a black list.

All these sensors and others can all be found on the CustomSensors Wiki page at Google Code.

Thank You!

A big “Thank you!” to all users that are actively involved in the development of PRTG—contributing to the Knowledge Base or sharing their program code. For us, it’s a great pleasure to be close to our customers.
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