Our new MQTT sensors: video tutorials

 Originally published on September 11, 2020 by Shaun Behrens
Last updated on January 23, 2024 • 6 minute read

Over the past few months, we've rolled out several new MQTT sensors for PRTG Network Monitor that enhance the capabilities for monitoring the IoT and IIoT. In the near future, I'll be giving you some examples of use cases to demonstrate their usefulness in industrial IT, but for now, we put together some tutorial videos to show you how to use the sensors.

MQTT Subscribe Custom sensor

With the MQTT Subscribe Custom sensor, you can subscribe to a specific MQTT topic and monitor up to five numerical values from the received JSON data. As with other PRTG sensors, you can customize the channels you display according to your requirements.

MQTT Roundtrip sensor

The MQTT Roundtrip sensor is basically a "ping" for MQTT devices. You can use it to check  if a broker is available, if it accepts messages, and if it forwards message to subscribers. The sensor also measures connection times and the round trip time from publishing a message until receiving it back for a subscribed topic.

MQTT Statistics sensor

You can use the MQTT Statistics sensor to check if the broker and IoT devices are sending messages, and you can get related statistics such as the number of incoming messages for a subscribed topics, received payload, and more.

Your feedback

These sensors are currently in a beta version, which does mean that features and functionality can change. It also means that we value your feedback about how to make them better! If you have comments, thoughts and suggestions about the new sensors, let me know below. 

If you are interested in what else PRTG can do in an industrial IT environment, check out this blog post, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get useful updates about the IT world, industrial IT, and PRTG.