How to monitor NIC Teaming using Paessler PRTG

When I took the first sip of my Bosnian coffee and looked at the picture of a group of people rowing in the same direction, I asked myself: “What is a Team?”

There are different definitions of Team, and every one of them drives us in the same direction. According to the Cambridge dictionary, a “Team” is a group of people working together. “Team” is also two or more animals working together eg pulling a cart, plow, etc.

Well, we can apply the same analogy to NIC Teaming.

NIC Teaming is a team of multiple network cards that work together to increase the performance and provide redundancy to network cards.

NIC Teaming serves its purpose, however, it can not monitor itself. You need to do it using NMS (Network Monitoring Solution). This article is about how to do it with Paessler PRTG.

A bit of background

NIC Teaming in Windows Server allows you to combine multiple physical and virtual network interfaces into a single logical virtual adapter called NIC Team. The feature is available in Windows Server, Windows Full Desktop Experience (with GUI), and Server Core (without GUI).

The idea is to provide a better performance, reliability, load balancing, and redundancy between network cards. NIC Teaming is also known as link aggregation, bandwidth aggregation, and load balancing and failover (LBFO).

I wrote an article on how to implement it in Windows Server 2022. The article is published by 4sysops – one of the best sources for IT Admins. You can read it here NIC Teaming in Windows Server 2022.

When you create a NIC Teaming adapter, you will see a new network adapter in your Network and Discovery applet. In my example, I combined three network cards into a single logical NIC called NIC Team.

It works quite fine. Now, the next step is to monitor it using Paessler PRTG.

How to monitor NIC Teaming?

Paessler PRTG provides you with native sensors to monitor the bandwidth and performance of the NIC Team in your Windows Servers.

You can use the WMI Network Card sensor and SNMP Traffic sensor to monitor bandwidth and Event ID to monitor relevant IDs for NIC Teaming. 

Remarks about WMI Network Card sensor: 

• NICs that are members of the NIC Team will not be discovered. 
• NICs that are not members of the NIC Team will be discovered. 
• The NIC Teaming will be discovered as Microsoft Network Adapter Multiplexor Driver. This adapter consists of three NICs. 

Remarks about SNMP Traffic sensor: 

• This sensor will discover NICs within the WIndows regardless if they are members of the NIC Teaming or not.
• The NIC Teaming adapter will be discovered as “NIC Teaming adapter name” Traffic. 

As a result, you will see something like this. 

You can enable “Show down the status for all disconnected states” to get a notification in case one or more members of NIC get disconnected. 

There are a few event IDs you can monitor using WMI Event Log and Event Log (Windows API). Some of the are: 

• 16949 – Member Nic {05c2a7f7-a42b-4c25-b47a-bcbbc2074091} Disconnected.
• 27 – The network link is disconnected.

This is an example of a ticket notification: 

Other relevant articles:

• My Event Log sensor ignores changes in the event log. What can I do? | Paessler Knowledge Base
• How can I monitor and gets alerts when an event log entry happens? | Paessler Knowledge Base

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Jasmin is a certified Paessler PRTG Monitoring Expert, Paessler PRTG Implementation Engineer, and Paessler PRTG Trainer.

Jasmin Kahriman