Step-by-Step Guide: Connect your PRTG to your Amazon Echo/Alexa

But only partially...

Today is not April Fools', and we still have exciting news for you.  No, we're not offering ambient user behavior monitoring (Layer 8 is just too hard!).  But we ARE offering voice-activated status information from your PRTG installation.  Today, we proudly present an Alexa Skill for PRTG!

At Paessler we love to try out new things, so when the Amazon Echo (finally!) became available in Germany, we jumped on the chance to try it out.  Here's the result of our proof-of-concept using Alexa to get status reports from the PRTG network monitoring software.

Check out Alexa chatting with PRTG:

Just in case you haven't heard of Alexa and Echo: the Amazon Alexa voice service (AVS) is a cloud service that lets you connect to devices and web services intuitively, using voice commands. The Echo and Echo Dot are Amazon's hands-free microphone and speaker devices which connect to the Alexa voice service for you. We used an Echo Dot, but if you don't have an Echo, there are free websites and apps that also work with Alexa.

PRTG Network Monitor is an all-inclusive, unified IT monitoring solution that combines a comprehensive set of monitoring features, an easy-to-use intuitive interface, and a state-of-the-art monitoring engine. It monitors uptime, usage and traffic, allowing you to save costs by avoiding outages, by optimizing your IT infrastructure, by saving time, and by controlling your SLAs.

Over 150000 system administrators worldwide use PRTG to monitor their IT infrastructure, and now they can use this Alexa skill to speak to their PRTG installations.

What Can I Ask PRTG?

Using the configuration and code in the tutorial below, you can ask things like:

• Alexa, ask PRTG how my network is doing
• Alexa, ask PRTG what's the status of my network?
• Alexa, ask PRTG about yesterday
• Alexa, ask PRTG how many scans ran yesterday
• Alexa, ask PRTG about sensor 1002
• Alexa, ask PRTG how many error sensors I have
• Alexa, ask PRTG how many unusual sensors are there?

But this is just the beginning. Feel free to extend this sample code so you can ask PRTG anything that's available via the PRTG API (and that's a lot!).

Want To Give It A Try?

Since the instructions are too long for a blog post, we've created a pdf that you can download and print, with detailed instructions on how to create an Alexa skill, the code you need for the Alexa lambda function, and the API files to enable your PRTG server to respond.

Go ahead, start talking to PRTG now: