Welcome Wizard

This wizard runs once when you open the client for the first time. It allows you to define important configuration parameters:

Access password - to restrict access to client GUI and monitoring database
Default user account - to be supplied by default when monitored resource asks for authentication
E-mail settings - to send e-mail notifications and regular reports

Welcome Wizard

You can Cancel this wizard and enter the parameters later using the Credentials and E-mail pages of a Settings dialog. However in this case the network discovery process that will start once you close the welcome wizard is likely not to find your network resources that require authentication and you won't get the e-mail reports and notifications on state changes. We recommend that you take these three simple steps and fill in the parameters.

Access Password

Page 1 - Access password

Here you submit a 'master password'. It is used

to protect other passwords in monitoring database (they are stored in encrypted form and master password is used to derive the encryption key)
to restrict access to client GUI: other windows users will have to enter the password once when they start the client; same user will not be asked to enter the password again until you change it

You can also protect the Web interface with the same password. If you select the checkbox to enforce this protection, you will be asked for the password once when opening the Web interface in browser or when navigating the Report View in client GUI.

When you move your existing monitoring database and install the IPHost Network Monitor on another computer, you will also be asked to enter the access password once. Make sure to remember it or write it down and store in a secret place.

Default User Account

Page 2 - Default user account

Some network resources such as e-mail servers and shared folders require users to authenticate before you can check their availability and query performance data such as amount of free space on disk. With IPHost Network Monitor you can specify the default user account to be supplied in such cases. In case there are resources that require different credentials for monitoring you can always override the default account in monitor configuration. But having the default account greatly reduces your configuration efforts. You can create a dedicated user account for monitoring and grant sufficient permissions to it; in this case you won't compromise your administrative account and will be able to distinguish regular users and monitoring activities in access logs of your servers.

It is important to define the default user and password on this step since the Discovery Wizard that will start after the Welcome Wizard will launch a network discovery process that tries to locate your networking services using the default account. If you omit this information, it may fail to discover some resources; others such as HTTP(S) servers with authentication enabled may be found but will report authentication errors.

The Test Credentials button allows you to test whether you've supplied working credentials to run the Discovery Wizard.

E-mail Account Settings

Page 3 - E-mail account settings

IPHost Network Monitor can send the e-mail messages including

regular reports (daily, weekly, monthly) for overall stystem
resource state change notifications
arbitrary reports that you generate and send manually using the Web interface

Most messages are sent to the Administrator e-mail address although you can specify other addresses instead or in addition to it.

To be able to receive these e-mail messages you should specify your SMTP server and e-mail address. If your SMTP server requires secure conenction, you can specify its credentials and type. As usually, you can skip this step and enter this data later using the Settings dialog.