Is there a way to use the Windows Network Card sensor to monitor NICs that have been aggregated? Alternatively is there a way to combine multiple sensors data to give me a better idea of the bandwidth for a server with teamed NICs?

We have some servers with Intel Pro NICs and the software used to team them creates a virtual NIC at the server level that is seen as a physical NIC to Windows (at least it appears in the device manager and in the network connections managers). For some reason this virtual NIC is not seen by the PRTG sensor.

Article Comments

Hello,

you could use a Sensor Factory Sensor to add the results of several individual WMI Network Card sensors. That should be possible for a solution in general.
But can you also please use our WMI Tester to scan against one of the servers with such a teamed NIC with the following query:

SELECT Name, BytesTotalPerSec FROM Win32_PerfRawData_Tcpip_NetworkInterface

Do you then see the teamed/virtual NIC in the list in the Tester? If yes, please copy the name and also run the following 2nd query with the name entered for <adaptername>:

SELECT IPAddress,MACAddress FROM Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration WHERE Description LIKE '<adaptername>'

Which result does this then bring?

best regards.


Feb, 2013 - Permalink

You can also use the SNMP Traffic Sensor, which will see the Teamed NIC properly.


Feb, 2013 - Permalink

I ended up installing the SNMP feature and using SNMP to monitor the teamed NICs, which is working nicely.

When I have more time I plan on playing around with the sensor factory to try and add together the results of several sensors. That sounds like a better solution to me, but SNMP worked in a pinch.


Feb, 2013 - Permalink

I've found that SNMP can handle high throughput monitoring better than WMI. I've got a handful of backup servers on 10Gb networks and WMI was consistently erroring out during high traffic periods.

I recommend staying with SNMP if you have similar scenarios.


Feb, 2013 - Permalink