User Management

The default administrator can use the PRTG installation as the only user or can create an unlimited number of users. Users are organized using an unlimited number of groups (which also control their security settings).

There are three types of users:

• Administrator users: Only members of the "PRTG Administrator" groups can create and edit user accounts and they can see and edit all monitoring objects.
• Read/Write users: These users can see all menus and links needed to edit the monitoring configuration (regardless of whether they are allowed to change it)
• Read Only users: These users will not see any editing links or menus and thus will not be able to edit the configuration

All the security settings as well as the rights management are conducted via the user groups. This means that group membership controls what a user may do and which objects he sees when logged in.

Creating New Users

For each new user the administrator user must specify a login name and an email address. New users can be created by selecting "Setup|Users" from the main menu and clicking on "Add new user".

Tip: If you want to control the rights of each user individually, you must create a user group for each user. This can be automated by choosing "Create new user group for this user" from the "Primary Group" drop-down when creating a new user account. This will create a new user and a new user group with the same name. In turn, you can use this user group to control the user's rights individually.

User Account Settings

Each user account has a number of settings that can be changed by the user (choose "Setup|My Account" from the main menu) or by the administrator. These settings are:

• Password: Here you can change your login password.
• Time zone: All times will be shown in this time zone as soon as the user is logged on.
• Auto refresh type and interval: PRTG automatically refreshes the content in your browser. Here you can choose between two different refresh methods, you can disable the refreshing and you can specify the refresh time (30s recommended).
• Audible alarm: Plays an alarm sound for each browser refresh whenever the number of alarms is not zero
• Chart Rendering and Flash Graph Delay: Choose whether you would like graphs based on static images (which load faster) or Flash based graphs (which offer more interactivity, e.g. with hover information for each value).
• Autofolding Settings: In order to provide you with a speedy user experience PRTG tries to keep the page size for the pages with the sensor tree small by automatically "folding" groups and devices with many items. The two settings "Max. Groups/Devices per Group" and "Max. Sensors per Device" control how many groups/devices or how many sensors are shown at max before the automatic reduction is performed. Recommended values are 10-30 for both settings. If you do not want to see any individual sensors in the tree view enter a zero for "Max. Sensors per Device".
• Account Type: Choose between Read/Write User and Read Only User (see above)
• Primary Group: Each user has a primary group which controls his rights.
• Active/inactive: The administrator can set a user to inactive, meaning the user can not log on.

 

Creating New User Groups

Creating new users is performed by selecting "Setup|User Groups" from the main menu and clicking on "Add new user group".

Controlling User Rights

Throughout the web interface of PRTG you can control access to the monitoring objects (e.g. groups, devices, sensors, maps, reports, etc.) using the following settings:

For sensor tree objects the default setting is to "Inherit Access Rights" which means that a user has the same access rights to all child objects if one has access to the object itself.

This can be overridden with the "User Group Access" option. You can specify the access rights to the current object for each user group by choosing an option from the drop down list:

The options are:

• Inherited: Uses the setting of the parent object
• None: User can not see or edit the object. The object does not show up in lists and in the sensor tree - unless a child object is visible to the user, then the object is visible in the sensor tree, yet not accessible.
• Read: User can see the object and review its monitoring status.
• Write: User can see the object, review its monitoring status and edit the object's settings - except for group access settings.
• Full: Same as "Write", but the User can additionally control the group access settings.

A user can only add and delete objects if the user has "Write" or "Full" access to the parent object.

You will see an additional checkbox for groups and devices, "Revert children's access rights to inherited". If you select this box, the access right of all child objects will be reset to "inherited" which actually deletes all individual right settings for the underlying objects. This is the quick way to reset all access rights and should be used with caution.

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