monitoring

Since the early days of networking, security has been one of the top subjects in the IT and network world and today it's more important than ever. Last year 58% of all administrators being asked by us mentioned IT security as one of their core tasks and said it's an ongoing challenge. Indeed, security includes much more than just a virus scanner or a firewall: BYOD and IoT bring new risks, small mistakes made can endanger data, and physical threats like fire or water also must be taken into account when developing a security concept.

After winning the Network Computing Award for "Bench Tested Product of the Year" in 2015 and for "Network Management Product of the Year" as well as "Product of the Year" in 2014, we were really excited when we heard about our nominations for 2016. This time around we were nominated in no less than four categories:

The NCAA Tournament is once again captivating audiences of American sports fans - including those who are at work. While March Madness continues to attract massive television audiences each year, they have increasingly sophisticated live streaming and mobile viewing options which are bringing in even more viewers - including office workers that don't have access to a television. Last year, 80.7 million live streams and 17.8 hours of live video were consumed during the tournament, a 17 percent increase over 2014. And when fans weren't watching, they were sharing clips and talking about the games on social media. The tournament posted a record 350 million total social impressions on Facebook and Twitter, a 45 percent increase over 2014.

Docker Containers are the new hot thing in terms of virtualization! First published in 2013 they have become popular extremely fast—meanwhile even Windows Server 2016 offers Docker Container integration. Not only do DevOps love Docker Containers as an easy to use and, first and foremost, quickly implementable virtualization method but network administrators also like to use them to efficiently roll out and reliably manage applications.

Monitoring via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is one of the easiest ways to stay on top of your IT infrastructure. PRTG Network Monitor uses this common, robust and well-established protocol to gather various information you need to know about your network devices. Just have a look at the various SNMP sensors PRTG offers from the get-go. However, sometimes you might want PRTG to show certain values that are not included in PRTG's standard libraries. Well, in this case, you can now use the SNMP Custom Advanced sensor: It monitors numerical values returned by one or more specific OIDs (Object Identifiers) using SNMP.

The following information only affects you if you are running PRTG Network Monitor V15.2.16.2229/2230 (released on April 28th 2015) through V16.1.21.1257/1258 (released on January 18th 2016).

Right in time for the Advent season we prepared a Christmas themed PRTG cut-out for each week in December. We asked you to grab your scissors and to get crafty with us. In return, every submission entered had the chance to win a Bose SoundLink Mini II Bluetooth Speaker at the end of the campaign as well as four PRTG goodie bags. Although we had only five prizes to give away we wanted to share all the fantastic entries we received.

PRTG Network Monitor offers a comprehensive overview of the performance and availability of your entire IT infrastructure. Each PRTG sensor provides information on individual aspects of a device or service, while some of them, such as the email round trip sensors, monitor entire, predefined processes. With the Business Process Sensor, PRTG now goes one step further. It allows you to combine several sensors in one, defining your own, more complex processes, and display them in PRTG.

It all began back in the spring/summer of 2015. I suggested to the team that we had made some fantastic progress with our channel partners over the past year or two and that we should submit an entry for Software Vendor of the Year in the upcoming CRN Channel Awards. Little did I know, 1200 words, a 2½ minute video and many months of nail biting later, that we would actually go on and win!