PRTG Manual: Recommended Sensors
With the Recommended Sensors Detection feature, PRTG can explore any device and check which sensors you have already created. If it finds useful sensors that you have not created yet, you see a list of recommended sensors for your device.
You cannot use this feature on the hosted probe of a PRTG Hosted Monitor instance. You can use this feature on remote probes.
The recommended sensors detection does not apply to the user group setting Allowed Sensors. Therefore, read/write users can also add all recommended sensors.
Recommended Sensors on Device Overview Tab
By default, PRTG recommends sensors for any device that you add and shows the suggested sensors for the device on its Overview tab, as long as your installation includes less than 5,000 sensors in total. To add the recommended sensors, click Add These Sensors.
You can see the time that has passed since the last sensor recommendation in the page header bar on the Overview tab of a device.
If you want to manually start the recommended sensors detection on any device, follow the steps below.
Open the Overview tab of the device that you want to analyze.
To start the analysis of your device, click Recommend Now or right-click the device and select Recommend Now from the context menu.
If you do not see the Recommend Now option, make sure that the Recommended Sensors Detection in the Monitoring settings. Probe devices do not support this option.
Depending on the complexity of your device, it can take some time until you see the results of the analysis.
Recommended Sensors Investigation
PRTG runs the recommended sensors detection with low priority in the background to prevent potential performance issues. Because of this, the recommended sensors detection can take more time than expected if PRTG needs resources to ensure the gapless monitoring of your network. By default, the recommended sensors detection starts automatically when you add a new device, when you do not have more than 5,000 sensors, or when the last analysis was executed more than 30 days ago. You can change these settings under Setup | System Administration | Monitoring, section Recommended Sensors Detection.
To recommend Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) sensors for a device, the detection engine uses the SNMP version that you defined in the Credentials for SNMP Devices section of the device settings.
After PRTG analyzed your device, it suggests a list of sensors that are useful for a more comprehensive monitoring.
List of Recommended Sensors
The list of recommended sensors provides the following information.
Column Header |
Description |
|---|---|
Priority |
Shows which priority the suggested sensors have when you add them. The recommended sensors table is sorted by priority, beginning with the top priority (
|
Sensors |
Shows the suggested sensors and the number of sensors of one type that PRTG recommends for this device. For example, you might want to add an SNMP Traffic sensor multiple times for several network interfaces. |
Total Sensors |
Shows the total number of suggested sensors per table row. These sensors have the same priority. |
Links |
Displays an Add These Sensors button for every table row. Click to automatically add the sensors in this table row to the device. |
The recommended sensors detection checks if a certain sensor exists on your device and recommends that you add this sensor if it does not exist. If this sensor existed previously on the device, but you deleted it, PRTG suggests this sensor again. In this case, ignore the recommendation of this sensor or follow step 4.
Step 4: Add Recommended Sensors
Click Add These Sensors in a table row to add all sensors in this row to the analyzed device.
If you want to add all suggested sensors regardless of their priority, click every Add These Sensors button in the Recommended Sensors table. If you want to add only some of the sensors of a certain priority, click Add These Sensors, then delete or pause the sensors you do not need afterward.
Settings for the Recommended Sensors Detection
You can also adjust the settings for the recommended sensors detection or disable it under Setup | System Administration | Monitoring.
Recommended Sensors Detection Settings
If you use the Manage automatically based on sensor count (default) setting, PRTG uses an intelligent assistant to count the number of sensors you have and decides whether to start the detection of recommended sensors or not. The detection does not start if your PRTG installation includes 5,000 sensors or more to prevent performance issues. We recommend that you use this option so that you do not miss any important monitoring data about your network and so that you do not risk performance issues.
Disable the recommended sensors detection if you encounter performance issues or if you do not want to display this information on device Overview tabs.
You can also use the auto-discovery to find suitable sensors. You can start the auto-discovery when you add a new device, you can manually start it at any time, or you can choose if you want PRTG to analyze a whole section of your network, for example, devices that are covered by a certain IP address range.
The auto-discovery has a higher priority than the detection of recommended sensors. If both are active, PRTG queues the sensor recommendation and executes the auto-discovery first.
