IPHost Network Monitor provides constant monitoring of your network's services and resources that are critically important for your company. Unlike many monitoring tools IPHost Network Monitor checks not only the availability of a resource but also its operability and performance characteristics.

The base element in IPHost Network Monitor is a monitor; it is checking the availability of a service on a remote computer and requesting the value of a certain parameter. The monitor has parameters that determine:

1. what and how should be checked (monitoring parameters),
2. the levels of acceptable and problem values of the checking results (defining the conditions of the monitor’s change of state),
3. actions to be performed when problems appear (action profile),
4. additional parameters such as a link to the basic report on the monitor, dependence on the availability of another monitor, and comments.

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Parameters of a Group of Monitors

Grouping monitors according to hosts and types of monitors provides a convenient way of specifying and changing parameters for a group of monitors at a time. For instance, by default a monitor uses monitoring parameters and conditions of the monitor’s change of state as well as an action profile assigned for the type of the monitor. Accordingly, changing the values of parameters for the type of the monitor will automatically be reflected on their values for specific monitors of this type. Of course, any monitor can also have individual values of these parameters that are not dependent on the values set for the type.

Polling

Monitors are polled (checked) with a regularity specified by the user. By default, monitors of the group “Basic connectivity” are checked every 30 seconds, all the rest – every minute. A minimum interval between checking is limited to 15 seconds because more frequent checks are practically useless, besides, they can lead to the performance degradation of the network or network resources, which contradicts with the goal of monitoring.

The result of a check is either a value or an error message. When checking failed, several repeated checks may be carried out (depending on the value in the “Down State” parameter. If the repeated checks did not succeed the monitor is switched to the “Down” state. If subsequent checks within the time period specified in the parameter “ExtendedDown State Latency” still persist in failing then the monitor is switched to the state “ExtendedDown”.

IPHost Network Monitor reacts to monitor transitions to problem states by executing actions assigned by the user. The actions are set in Action Profile. The structure of the system of actions and Action Profiles is described here.

If checking succeeded then the value obtained as a result (mostly it is Response Time; other examples are the size of a file or free space, etc.) is compared with the levels of Performance set by the user. For each monitor one can set two levels of Performance, they define the conditions of monitor transition to the states PerformanceWarning and PerformanceAlert. The monitor switches to one of these states either based on the results of one check or additional checks may be required (using the parameters PerformanceWarning State Iterations, PerformanceAlert State Iterations).

The OK state means that checking has succeeded and yielded an acceptable result.

Multilevel Checks

For most monitor types a possibility is provided to perform multilevel checks. For instance, for HTTP(S) type monitors a basic check is a call to a certain URL (GET or POST with optional parameters) while an additional check (second level) is the validation of a received page by means of checking for the presence or absence of a specified string on it. An example of a monitor with three levels of checking – SMTP:

1. Creating connection with an SMTP server;
2. User logging in;
3. Sending a test message.

Monitor States

In each moment of time monitor can be in one of ten states. There are five states in which monitoring is performed, namely the above described:

1. OK
2. PerformanceWarning
3. PerformanceAlert
4. Down
5. ExtendedDown

1. Discovered (a monitor has been found in the process of discovery and is waiting for review)
2. Stopped (monitoring has been terminated by the user)
3. Stopped by dependency (the monitor, on which this monitor depends, is in the state Down or ExtendedDown)
4. Unknown (means that a monitoring service is stopped or down)
5. Maintenance (the user can select whether monitoring should be continued during maintenance or not)

One can start/stop monitoring of any monitor/host or an entire group as well as performing a check at any moment using the toolbar in the Property View pane:

Dependencies

One can set the dependence of monitor checks on the state of another monitor. This means that the dependent monitor is checked only if the monitor on which it depends is in a state different from Down, Stopped or Stopped by Dependency.

This facility can be of especial use to establish for instance the dependence of monitor checking on the computers on the state of the router through which they are connected to the network. By default, a monitor depends on the monitor PING of its host.

Available Monitor Types

Description of other features