Paessler PRTG - Monitoring WMI sensors (Error 80070005)

WMI monitoring often fails with the following error “Connection could not be established (80070005: Access Denied …)”

Basic Steps

- First of all, please check if the correct credentials are used, especially if the hostname is entered in the field “Domain or Computer Name” in PRTG. Please do not leave this field empty!

- Also verify if any firewalls in between PRTG and the target machine(s) may be interfering with connections on port 135.

- The next thing you should try is to configure the PRTG Probe service to run under a domain administrator account. Sometimes the access rights of the System Account under which the PRTG Probe runs by default are not sufficient.

Next options have to be differentiated by the Windows version running on the target machine

Windows XP/2003
- Start the registry editor (regedit)

- Navigate to key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA\
- Make sure that “ForceGuest” is set to “0”

- Reboot

Windows Vista/2008 (R2)
- Open the control panel, head to the Windows firewall
- Click on “Change Settings” and then please select the “Exceptions” tab
- Select the check box for “Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)”
- Open a command prompt (as administrator) and enter the following line to set another firewall group rule

- netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (wmi)" new enable=yes

- Reboot

Windows 7
- Open Windows Firewall
- Click on “Advanced Settings” and then, for both Inbound and Outbound Rules
- Select all checkboxes for “Windows Management Instrumentation”
- Open a command prompt (as administrator) and enter the following line to set another firewall group rule

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (wmi)" new enable=yes

- Reboot