<%NUMBERING1%>.<%NUMBERING2%>.<%NUMBERING3%> PRTG Manual: Recommended Sensors

The Recommended Sensors option helps you to set up comprehensive monitoring. PRTG can explore any device and check which sensors you have already created. If it finds useful sensors that can complete your monitoring and have not yet been created, you see a list of recommended sensors for your specific device.

You cannot use this feature on the Hosted Probe of a PRTG hosted by Paessler instance. You can use this feature on remote probes.

Recommended Sensors on Device Overview Tab

Get Sensor Recommendations

By default, PRTG recommends sensors for any device that you add to PRTG and shows the suggested sensors for it on the Overview tab of the device, as long as your installation includes less than 5,000 sensors in total. To add these recommended sensors to your monitoring, click the Add These Sensors button.

If you want to manually start the detection engine for sensor recommendations on any desired device, follow the steps below.

You can see the time that has passed since the last sensor recommendation in the page header bar on the Overview tab of this device.

Step 1: Choose the Device

Open the Overview tab of the device that you want to analyze.

Step 2: Recommend Now

To start the analysis of your device, click the Recommend Now button 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 Recommended Sensors Detection is enabled under Setup | System Administration | Monitoring. Probe devices do not offer 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 device analysis in the background with low priority to prevent potential performance issues. Consequently, the recommended sensors analysis can take more time than expected if PRTG needs resources to ensure gapless monitoring of your network in the first place. By default, the sensor recommendation engine 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 SNMP sensors for a device, the detection engine uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) version that you defined in the Credentials for SNMP Devices section of the device settings.

Step 3: Get the Results

After analyzing your device, PRTG 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:

Recommended Sensors
Priority	Show which priority the suggested sensors have when you add them. The recommended sensors table is sorted by priority, beginning with top priority (5 stars) in the first row. You can manually change the priority of a sensor after adding it.
Sensors	Show the suggested sensors and the number of sensors of one type that PRTG recommends for this device (for example, you might want to add a sensor of the type SNMP Traffic multiple times for several network interfaces).
Total Sensors	Show the total number of suggested sensors per table row. These sensors have the same priority.
Links	Display an Add These Sensors button for every table row. Click to automatically add the sensors listed in this table row to the device.

The detection engine checks if a certain sensor currently exists on your device and recommends that you add this sensor if it does not exist yet. If this sensor previously existed 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 the Add These Sensors button 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 and not all of them, click Add These Sensors first and then delete or pause the ones you do not need.

Settings for the Recommended Sensors Analysis

You can also adjust the Recommended Sensors Detection. Go to Setup | System Administration | Monitoring to select whether

you want PRTG to decide on the sensor recommendation (default), or
you want the recommended sensors to always be displayed, or
you want to turn off the recommended sensors option.

If you use the default setting, PRTG uses an intelligent assistant that takes care of your specific network monitoring situation. PRTG automatically counts the number of sensors you have and decides whether to start the recommended sensors detection or not. It does not start if your PRTG installation includes 5,000 sensors or more to prevent performance issues. We recommend that you set this default option so you do not miss any important monitoring data about your network without risking 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.

Do you want to get more help with choosing and creating useful sensors? This is possible in PRTG with the Auto-Discovery! You can activate it when adding a new device to PRTG, manually at any time, or choose if you want PRTG to analyze a whole section of your network, for example, devices covered by a certain IP range.

The auto-discovery has a higher priority than the recommended sensors detection. If both are active, PRTG queues the sensor recommendation and executes the auto-discovery first.

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