Tree View Pane

The Tree View pane provides different views of the monitored objects and allows taking a quick glance at the system status. It contains a toolbox control with five tree views: By Host, By Monitor Type, By Current State, Discovery and Favorites. These tree views group monitors differently and provide convenient ways to analyze the system status. Each node of a tree carries an icon and a textual description. Icons for individual monitors show a current monitor state such as OK or Down. Group icons for hosts, host groups and other group objects depict a group of monitors and contain a small state icon on the right-hand bottom corner that corresponds to the worst state of the child monitors within a group. This helps to identify problematic items within a tree. at the bottom right corner of a group icon that corresponds to the worst state of child monitors within a group. This helps to identify the problematic items within a tree.

The tree contains two columns, Availability and Performance, that show actual monitoring results for the last 24 hours and current performance of each monitor. When you poll monitor or group, polling results are displayed in these columns immediately when they become available. You can hide these columns by right-clicking the tree header as shown above.

Changing the focus in a Tree View reloads the contents of all the other dockable windows on the screen accordingly; in this way you can get a property page, summary report, and log for each group or an individual monitor. When you click a hyperlink in the Report View or Log View, the content of the Tree View pane gets updated along with the other dockable windows to show the selected item. The most demanded actions are available from the context menu of the Tree View pane that appears when you right-click the selected monitor or group.

Monitor Tooltip

You can click a particular colored bar in a States Graph to get a tooltip with key information for the selected time period: its time boundaries, worst monitor state in this period and its duration (which may be less than total time), error message (for Down and Extended Down), last poll result (for active states), availability and performance summary, links to the reports from Web interface for this monitor. The tooltip is designed to speedup monitoring results analysis and incident investigation.

Tree View Pane

By Host

This tree view contains all monitors; it has three levels: Host Groups, Hosts, and Monitors. On network discovery, all hosts that only respond to PING requests are added to the Desktops And Notebooks group; hosts that provide some services except PING are added to the Servers group. You can move a host to a different group by changing the Host Group parameter for it on the Property Editor pane. Grouping the hosts allows getting reports for particular groups; say a problem report for your Printers.

By Monitor Type

This tree view contains all monitors and has three levels: Monitor categories, Monitor types, and Monitors. There are seven monitor categories: Basic Connectivity (includes PING, TCP, and UDP monitor types), Mail (POP3, IMAP, and SMTP), Internet (HTTP and FTP), Network (SNMP Custom monitor type), Resources (flie, disk space, Windows service, and a WMI query monitor), Databases (ODBC, Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL Databases), and Custom (monitors implemented as scripts or external programs).

By Current State

This tree view also contains all monitors; it has two levels: Current State and Monitors. There are several possible states for each monitor; they are shown here.

OK - a monitor is being successfully polled and its performance is acceptable.
Performance Warning - a monitor's performance is outside the warning level limits.
Performance Problem - a monitor's performance is outside the problem level limits.
Down - a monitor cannot be reached because of a connection timeout or returns an error (error message returned by the monitor is available in the Log View panel).
Extended Down - a monitor is in a Down state longer than the time called Extended Down state latency (you can define it in the Availability section of the Property Editor).
Unknown - a monitor is activated but its status is not known either because the monitoring service is stopped or because the monitor has a performance or availability repeat count greater than 1 and the number of polls attempted since the service was started is less than this counter value so the performance cannot be calculated yet.
Stopped - a monitor was explicitly stopped by the user; the monitoring service does not poll it. The trial version of the product also stops all monitors found during network discovery except for the first twenty.
Stopped by Dependency - a monitor depends on another monitor that is in a state Down, Extended Down or Stopped by Dependency. This is a finite definition since loops in dependency chains are forbidden.
Maintenance - a monitor is not being polled since its host is on maintenance. The global maintenance table may be found in the Global Settings dialog. Note that when you specify that the monitors on some host should be polled during maintenance, they will remain in another active state such as OK or Performance Warning. Only if polling of the host should be stopped during maintenance will all of its monitors enter the inactive Maintenance state.
Discovered - a monitor has recently been discovered but not activated yet ('activate discovered monitors' checkbox from the second page of Discovery Wizard was not selected so all discovered monitors got a distinguished inactive state, Discovered). This state reminds you that there is a newly found resource and you should decide how to handle it (start, start and then stop, delete permanently or just leave it in the Discovered state). To determine when a particular monitor was discovered please check its Created property in the Property Editor.

Discovered

This view has one level. It shows all monitors that are currently in a Discovered state. Monitors are sorted by date of discovery. The view is provided for convenience. It is planned to add a second level to this view where nodes will correspond to individual discoveries.

Favorites

This view has one level. It contains monitors marked as Favorite. You decide what monitors to place in this view by clicking the Favorite button on the Monitor Control toolbar, or by selecting the Show in Favorites checkbox for this monitor in Property Editor. By selecting a root item of the Favorites view you get a summary report for the most critical resources in your system.

Context Menu

The context menu appears when you right-click an item in a tree and provides handy access to the most demanded actions for monitors and groups.

Poll now, Start, Stop - allow controlling a monitor in the same way as from the toolbar in Property Editor or from Monitor Control toolbar; the items are disabled if there is nothing to start, stop or poll for a selected tree object.
Open Report in Browser - opens the default web browser with the Web interface of the system; a report for a selected monitor or group is loaded to the Web interface.
Admin Tools - provides a way to start a particular administrative program for the selected host or for the host of selected monitor (for all other types of objects, this menu item is disabled). You configure the commands to start admin tools using the Admin Tools page of a Settings dialog. The following choices are available:
- Remote Desktop Client: launches a remote desktop client to connect to target host
- SSH: launches a GUI secure shell client, if one is configured
- Telnet: launches a Telnet client
- Device Web Interface: opens the Device Web Interface URL of a host in your default Web browser
- SNMP Browser: allows starting an SNMP Browser on target host. If the host contains SNMP monitor(s) and/or there are SNMP SET actions for it, they will be listed in the configuration form so that you can use SNMP settings of any existing monitor or action to open an SNMP browser. Otherwise, you will have to enter SNMP settings manually but the dialog will fill in reasonable defaults for you. Once you provide the settings and submit the form, an SNMP browser for the target host is launched.
Copy, Rename, Delete - allow you to copy the host or monitor, change the host group, host or monitor name, or to permanently delete it.
New Host Group, New Host, New Monitor - allow creating a host group, host or monitor.
Show Property Editor, Show Report View, Show Log View - these items appear when a corresponding dockable window is hidden; clicking on such an item shows the window. This proves convenient when you use an Internet pager-like layout of the main window where only the Tree View is shown and you want to open a report or properties for the monitor that enters a bad state such as Down.