We have just over 20,000 sensors on one remote probe, which is obviously currently overloaded and stressed out. I'd like to spin up a few more remote probes and distribute the sensor load, but I'm worried about moving large numbers of sensors at once.

Article Comments

Hello Dawidawid, thank you for your post.

Wow, 20,000 sensors is quite a number, please just allow me to remind you that our official recommendation is no more than 10,000 sensors on a whole PRTG Core Server, above that you may experience bad performance or even stability issues.


As for moving devices between probes, that's absolutely fine and safe. Please understand that a probe doesn't for instance (with a few exceptions) use any persistent storage, it connects to the core server and the core server tells the probe "Monitor SNMP CPU on server A.B.C.D", the probe does that and sends the result to the core server "CPU on server A.B.C.D = 20%".

When you "move" devices between probes PRTG tells the old probe "Stop monitor CPU on server A.B.C.D" and tells the new probe "Monitor SNMP CPU on server A.B.C.D".


There's just a few things you should ask yourself (double check) before moving devices and sensors:

  1. Can the new probe reach the target system (Firewall rules, routing, network, DNS, etc)
  2. Does the remote probe have the "software" required by the sensors that I'm moving (Exe sensors have to be copied manually, sensors that depend on software like the Dell Powervault MDi sensors rely on the "Modular Disk Storage Manager" software which needs to be installed on the new probe as well).
  3. Do the target systems "trust" the new probe (for instance, when using SNMP you may have specified "Allowed Managers", for WMI the machine should be in the same Windows Domain).

But from PRTG's perspective, moving devices/sensors between probes is no problem at all.

Best Regards,


May, 2016 - Permalink