Classic remote probe for Linux / Docker
More and more of our customers won't allow Windows hosts in their environments at all. The AI infrastructure customers in particular are Linux-only shops, and for them "the probe needs a Windows VM" has gone from an annoyance to a dealbreaker. We're an MSP running hundreds of thousands of sensors across plenty of cores, so this comes up constantly.
I know the official answer is the multi-platform probe. We evaluated it seriously and it isn't a replacement for us yet. Sensor coverage is part of it, but the bigger problem was customer security reviews. InfoSec teams approve the classic probe fast because the model is easy to explain: one outbound TLS connection to the core on 23560, nothing listening on the probe side, manual approval on the core before any sensor runs. With the MPP we end up explaining NATS, its port, its certificates, and its patch history, and reviews that used to take days now won't even pass. The classic probe's simplicity is a feature. Please don't leave it without a Linux story.
The old KB answers said a Linux probe was impossible because Wine couldn't run background services and had no usable .NET. That was true in 2013. It isn't anymore. I wrote and maintain an open source project that runs the stock, unmodified probe binary headless under Wine 11 in Docker:
https://github.com/rtravellin/prtg-classic-probe-linux.
WMI sensors, the .NET helpers, PowerShell sensors and packet capture all work. Nothing in the probe binary needed changing. Every fix lives in the open source Wine layer, which says to me the port is smaller than it once looked.
So the request: an officially supported classic probe for Linux, ideally as a container image. Even an experimental or beta image with best-effort support would let us deploy to Windows-free sites today while the MPP catches up on sensors. Happy to share everything I learned getting it running under Wine, though most of it is already written up in the repo.
Richard Travellin
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Hello Richard,
Thank you for this detailed and well-argued request, and for the impressive open-source work behind it! You're right: Windows-free environments are becoming more common, and the classic probe's simple security model is a real strength in customer security reviews. We hear this from other customers as well.
Still, we have to decline this request. The classic probe is architecturally tied to Windows, and officially supporting it on Linux via a compatibility layer isn't a path we will take. Our strategic direction for Linux is the multi-platform probe.
What we can share: the friction you describe is on our radar. We're actively working on simplifying the MPP's connection architecture and deployment model, with the explicit goal of making security reviews much easier, and sensor coverage continues to grow with every release.
We'd genuinely encourage you to re-evaluate the MPP as these improvements ship, and we're sorry this isn't the answer you were hoping for. Thank you again for the effort! Feedback at this level of depth is exactly what we want, even when we can't act on it the way you'd like.
Best regards,
The Paessler Product Team