A quick look at the calendar tells me that it's June 10, 2020. 90% of my colleagues (including myself) continue to work remotely from our homes. This is also reflected in the release 20.2.59 of PRTG Network Monitor, which was developed entirely at home - thanks to the advantages of agile, location-independent software development.
The current version of PRTG comes with some significant new features, including two brand new native sensors. Let's have a look at the details...
With the new MQTT Statistics sensor in this version, you can check if your IoT devices and the broker are still sending messages. The sensor monitors MQTT topics and shows related statistics of the broker, like the number of incoming messages from a subscribed topic and the received payload. Check the screenshot below for more information on the new sensor.
While on the subject of MQTT, we also updated our MQTT Round Trip sensor. If you already use this sensor, please check the information message that appears at the sensor after updating to PRTG version 20.2.59.
From now on you also have the option to visualize the status of MQTT brokers on your dashboards so that you can identify the status right away. For this, we added 4 new map objects for MQTT brokers (each object available with and without status). They look like this:
The new DNS v2 sensor monitors a DNS server, resolves domain name records, and compares the records to a defined filter. It shows the response time of the DNS server, if records were resolved, the number of records, as well as the number of records matching the filter. With the help of this monitoring data, you can check if resolving a domain works, if the number of certain records changes, and if a certain record exists for a domain.
A look at the screenshot already reveals that the new DNS v2 sensor records much more information than its predecessor. The sensor is still in beta status, but you can add it at any time - for example, you can start by setting it up in parallel with your existing DNS sensors.
If you use the PRTG Active Directory integration for your user accounts, you now have the option to define how PRTG performs Active Directory queries. You can choose to use the domain name (as you can currently) or use specific domain controllers. The new Domain Access setting is available under Core & Probes in the PRTG setup.
The AWS Cost sensor now supports complex PRTG cluster installations. The Windows Updates Status (PowerShell) sensor now provides the option to include the port number in the SPN (Service Principal Name) used for Kerberos authentication.
Deleting a connected remote probe from the PRTG device tree will now stop the PRTG probe service on the probe system and set the startup type to "manual" to prevent the removed remote probe from sending unnecessary connection attempts to the PRTG server.
Aside from that, we also fixed 29 bugs, implemented 46 feature tickets, and finished 21 tasks, ToDos, and stories with PRTG release 20.2.59. For all the details simply check out our release notes page.
We published a new version of the Paessler SNMP Tester! SNMP Tester 20.2.4 comes with the new advanced setting Use GetNext. This allows your to perform GETNEXT requests on SNMP devices to test the SNMP compatibility. Until now, the tool only used SNMP GET.
This can be a really helpful option when it comes to troubleshooting, as it works for SNMP devices from some manufacturers / OS versions. You can download the installer for the new version here.
Find out more about SNMP monitoring with PRTG here.
As already mentioned above, we offer a public roadmap of PRTG on our website. There you can read at any time about which features we are currently working on and what kind of things we want to implement in PRTG in the future.