Dirk Paessler

Dreaming of Iceland (Video)

Three minutes of wanderlust – Watch my short video about my trips to Iceland in 2017 and 2018!

Watch it in Full Screen!!!

Comparison: Seven devices between €69 and €500 for monitoring environmental parameters like temperature and humidity with PRTG

As the founder of “The network monitoring company” Paessler AG it came quite natural to me to not only monitor our home network but also various environmental metrics in our family home. We had moved into our new home a year and a half ago and having temperature data series has been quite helpful to do the fine tuning and bug-fixing of the heating and venting systems.

I am not so much a maker person like my colleagues who built their own smart thermometers for our office building. I like to use prefabricated devices. So I ordered 6 different out-of-the-box devices (mostly from Amazon) to monitor temperatures etc. in our house. I connected all these sensors to my PRTG installation which also monitors the heating system and solar panels via ModbusTCP and many other systems of the house.

Read on in my blog post on the Paessler company blog.

My Fridays-for-Future project: Monitoring the CO₂ in the atmosphere to stay aware of Earth’s most important metric

Today thousands of students of the Fridays-for-Future movement are on strike. They protest for more aggressive action against climate change. Formally I am not a student anymore, but I consider myself a life-long learner and student of life as well. So here is my student-contribution for global awareness of the CO₂ crisis.

Comparison: Seven devices between €69 and €500 for monitoring environmental parameters like temperature and humidity with PRTG

Here is an overview of the sensor devices I am using:

This is my favorite free weather outlook widget for my dashboards

With PRTG I can do “live” monitoring of things, e.g. environmental stuff like the current sunlight (solar panels), my heating system and temperatures throughout the building. I also wanted to add a look into the future so I looked around for a html widget to display the weather outlook that I could add to my PRTG maps.

How I monitor my garage door for €69 (and without access to power and wifi)

Every other night we forgot to close our garage door in the evening and it stayed open all night. Obviously we needed a door monitoring that alerts us whenever the door was left open after 20:00. There were just two tiny problems: There was no close-by power outlet or ethernet port and the steel enforced concrete structure of our garage shielded off our home wifi networks.

In this article I will describe a solution which is based on the Sigfox IoT wireless network and PRTG which I use to monitor our home.

What to do when Teamviewer goes offline as the PC goes into “connected standby” mode

The power saving feature “connected standby” of Windows 10 causes PCs to go offline from Teamviewer, so you can’t wake them up and connect/control them. But there is a trick that stops this behavior.

How to Monitor all available Wifi Networks and their Signal Strengths with PRTG (Custom Sensor Script)

In this article I will show how to monitor all available wifi networks (SSIDs) and their signal strength using PRTG.

The smartest home in town

The Basics of Modbus Monitoring with PRTG Network Monitor (With Custom Sensor Script)

Article explains how Modbus/TCP works and shows how to monitor Modbus/TCP enabled devices with PRTG Network Monitor

The Modbus protocol has been around forever (since 1979 to be exact) and is used by many industrial systems, but also energy systems like heat pumps and solar converters. Initially it was used via serial communications, then – in 2007 – a TCP based version was created that communicates via TCP, usually using port 502.

The following article explains how Modbus/TCP works and shows how I can monitor Modbus/TCP enabled devices with PRTG Network Monitor using a simple PowerShell script.

I wish I could share a one-size-fits-all script that just works for most people. But unfortunately this task usually requires some hacking and coding…