Web Interface Overview

IPHost Network Monitor comes with a Web interface that provides you with access to monitoring reports and system summary. There are four tabs:

• Dashboard - presents summary status of your system
• Reports - provides access to different types of monitoring reports
• Alerts - displays recent availability and performance problem notifications
• Help - online help pages

The general layout of the Web interface main window is the same for all tabs. On the left side of the window there is a Tree panel. It is separated from the Parameters panel and Contents panel by a vertical splitter which you can drag to resize the panels. The Parameters panel is at the top of the window and is separated from the Contents panel by a grey non-movable horizontal line.

You can hide most of the Parameters panel by clicking the button. This proves useful when you generate several reports of the same type for different monitors or resource groups and don't want the report parameters to occupy space on your screen. Once you hide the parameters, the button changes to and clicking on it causes the Parameters panel to reappear.

Different tabs load different types of content to the panels as described below.

There is a special version of IPHost Web interface for mobile devices. It is optimized for small screen resolution and slow connections; however, it only provides reporting functionality and generated reports contain less information. You can access mobile version of Web interface by navigating or bookmarking an URL like http://yourhost.yourdomain:8084/nms_mobile.

Note: You can configure IPHost Web Interface to work via the secure channel (HTTPS).

Note: Web Interface can play sound alerts. To achieve this, define 'Sound Alert' with 'Play Sound in Web browser' checkbox selected in Settings > Alerts in Monitoring Client, add it to some Alerting Rule and assign it to some monitors. When state transitions take place for these monitors, and your Alerting Rule requires playing a sound in a Web browser for these state changes, Web interface will play it when either one of Dashboard, Reports, or Alerts tabs is open. You should have Adobe Flash enabled in order to play sound alerts, and Apache Web Server which serves the Web interface should not use ports below 1024 reserved for other standard TCP based protocols (these ports are blocked in Adobe Flash player). By default, the Web Server uses the port 8084 which is permitted.

Dashboard

This tab provides overview of your system status. The Tree panel contains summary of current statuses of all monitors, links to useful reports and links to online resources. The Parameters panel allows chosing what types of information to show in the Contents panel. There are four blocks which may be shown:

• Availability Problems - resources with worst availability for the last 24 hours
• Performance Problems - resources with worst performance for the last 24 hours
• Favorites - all monitors from Favorites view
• Latest Log Entries - most recent log records

You can also determine how many records to show in these blocks using the setting in the Parameters panel (this setting doesn't affect Favorites; all of them are shown regardless of it).

Reports

The Reports tab provides several views of statistical data and allows you to:

• quickly overlook the current and all previous states of your network resources
• get a list of problems that have been observed over a period of time
• study trends and detect performance degradation early when it appears
• obtain detailed reports that include a useful performance graph and detailed log of resource state changes

You can choose different groups of monitors for building a report; you can also choose any desired timeframe as well as one of the several predefined time intervals such as Today or Last week.

The Tree contents match the contents of Tree View in the client application described in the section Tree View Pane. There is a combo box to select a view (you can select the Hosts, Monitor types, States, Discovery or Favorites tree). Once the selected tree is loaded, you can navigate through it and highlight the necessary monitor or group of resources; your selection becomes prominent in bold type. The report gets generated when you select a tree node and when you press the Generate button on the Parameters panel.

The Parameters panel allows you to identify:

1. the type of report (from the combo box).
   
   There are three report types: Summary, Problems, and Trends. A summary report for a monitor contains a performance graph and state change log; all other reports include "pseudo graphs" (color-coded state change records) and a statistical summary. Please refer to Report Types and Generation for more information on report types.
2. the report period. There are several predefined periods that you can select from the combo box; once you do so, the system will set the report start and end dates automatically.
   
   You can also define the start and end dates of a report manually; the report period will be reset to Custom. Dates are selected using a calendar, and times are chosen from the combo box with a 30-minute accuracy.
   
   

When you are done with selecting the report, you can either (the report will appear in the Report panel) or it (the report will appear in a new browser window or tab without the Tree View and Parameters panel, and the standard Printer selection dialog will be shown to allow printing). You can also the report over E-mail (a form will appear where the destination address and the message subject may be changed; by default, the report is sent to the administrator e-mail address).

Following the hyperlinks in reports shown in the Web interface reloads the whole interface with a corresponding monitoring object, type of report, and report period already selected. You can share these links with your colleagues who should look at the report in question. You can also open such a link in a new browser window or tab to create a copy of the Web interface that already displays the necessary report. In contrast, navigating Tree View and changing the report parameters does not reload the Web interface; only the Report panel of it gets updated when you press the button.

Alerts

Here you can review alerts of availability and performance problems that took place recently. The Tree panel displays the monitor tree as in the Reports tab; the Parameters panel allows chosing a subset of problematic monitor states for which you would like to see state change notifications and chosing an alerting period. The Contents panel is divided in two sections by a movable splitter. The top area displays the last alert; you can resize it to make the alert visible from long distance. The bottom area lists other alerts that took place earlier.

You can acknowledge some of the alerts by pressing corresponding link near the alert description. It is also possible to acknowledge all alerts you see by pressing the Acknowledge all button on the Parameters panel. Once you acknowledge some alert it disappears from this view and won't be shown even if you reopen it of change some settings.

Help

This tab provides online access to the help pages. Tree panel contains help index; Parameters panel displays path to current page and Contents panel displays the help page itself.

Web server

Web interface is provided by Apache web server, version 1.3.37; its configuration file httpd.conf may be found in the conf subdirectory of your installation directory and you can change it to suit your needs. The client GUI changes this file to enable or disable Digest HTTP authentication with the access password when you modify corresponding setting on a Credentials page of a Settings dialog.

Access IPHost Web Interface via HTTPS

To enable the secure HTTPS version of the IPHost Web Interface the Apache's configuration file httpd.conf should be changed manually. Uncomment the following two lines in the httpd.conf file located at C:\Program Files\IPHost Network Monitor\conf directory:

LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so
AddModule mod_ssl.c

and restart the monitoring service. Now you can access HTTPS version of Web interface by navigating or bookmarking an URL like https://yourhost.yourdomain/nms.