Paessler PRTG in 2021. A brief look back.

“Wow. 2020 was quite a hell ride for all of us! And I don't just mean us at Paessler, but really all of us. The whole planet experienced a rather exceptional year!“

Sascha Neumeier, Paessler AG, exactly 1 year ago here.

This is how I started last year's review of PRTG. I had no idea that I would be able to use the same introduction for a look-back at 2021. 🤯

I hope you are well and have come through this challenging time healthy and full of energy. Today I am here to tell you something positive, and what could be more natural than to write about the last 12 months of growth and progress of PRTG?

Paessler PRTG Highlights 2021

18 new sensor types

First, let's look at what sensor types were newly added to PRTG in 2021. For the sake of clarity, I've divided them by topic.

Experimental features

With PRTG release 21.1.65 back in February, we introduced Beta Senors in PRTG as an Experimental Features setting. This makes it possible for you to try out upcoming features from our labs and provide us early feedback. The introduction of experimental features is accompanied by a new handling of beta sensors. We shared more details with you in the article New handling of beta sensors in PRTG Network Monitor.

Improved sensors and product features

In addition to new sensors, we also improved some existing sensor types. Due to higher scalability of our SNMP sensors, PRTG can now perform more SNMP v3 requests at the same time.

The Modbus TCP Custom sensor now allows session sharing and you can create device templates that include the Modbus TCP Custom sensor.

You can now show text messages from your IoT devices using our MQTT Subscribe Custom sensor. The same sensor type also supports up to 10 Channels so that you can monitor up to 10 values from a subscribed MQTT topic.

We added Single Sign-On via Azure AD, allowing you to utilize domain credentials to access PRTG.

In terms of Reporting we increased the speed with which PRTG creates reports. This leads to faster report generation, especially with more sensors or longer time periods.

In December, we shared the first news about our Alpha releases of a brand new UI, API and a multi-platform Probe that also runs on Windows Docker, Linux and more.

Screenshot of Paessler PRTG with new UI activated

PRTG for specific industries

We also took a closer look at various industries last year, and came up with special offers for industrial monitoring, healthcare and data centers.

This results in many different sensor types for IoT and IIoT, intended for everything from infrastructure in data centers all the way to complex hospital infrastructures, which we can now monitor even more precisely with PRTG.

This also resulted in a completely independent product - the Paessler Building Monitor.

Some facts and figures

• We held more than 100 webinars in over 10 languages
• We held more than 50 virtual PRTG technical training courses
• 111 new blog articles appeared on this blog in 2021
• Our fabulous developers provided you with 9 new stable releases of Paessler PRTG

And all of this was done remotely as far as possible, using our hybrid working model, which we launched at the end of 2020. In this first hybrid year, we've learned a lot, and are faced with topics like asynchronous working more and more. If you want to learn more about how we at Paessler have changed the way we work, I recommend reading the article Office owl, flexible flamingo, or remote raccoon? How we at Paessler are changing the way we work.

Plans for 2022, anyone?

We will start the new year with some notable improvements to our cloud-based monitoring solution Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor. For more details, have a look at the article Global launch of Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor.

Of course, we will continue to work on the new user interface and the features of our new RESTful API. We will also continuously extend our recently introduced Multi-Platform Probe. One of our goals is to make the probe available on ARM-based devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Last but not least, just before Christmas, we updated our PRTG public roadmap. Seems our product managers are planning some pretty neat stuff for 2022! 🧐

And most important: Please give us as much of your feedback as possible! You have the opportunity to influence further development and feature implementation!

You rock!

Riiight! Also at the end of the article, the previous year's article repeats itself! You are still awesome! Because as sysadmins and IT managers, you help keep the IT infrastructures around the globe up and running. Because in my opinion you have made a good choice for monitoring with PRTG. 😉 Because you contribute with your feedback, and also with some critical words, so that we can continuously make PRTG even better. And because you let us know that you love PRTG as much as we do. Thank you! We at Paessler are excited about a great 2022 together!