IPHost Network Monitor provides constant monitoring of 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 checks the availability of a service on a remote or local computer and requests a value of a certain parameter. The monitor has parameters that determine:

1. monitor name,
2. monitor definition (what and how should be checked – monitoring parameters),
3. time interval between polls,
4. dependency settings: should the monitor change its state after another monitor has changed its state,
5. what kind of reports should be sent and how often.

You can set the conditions that define when the monitor should change its state on State conditions tab. You can specify what alerts should the monitoring service send if the monitor changes its state or event occurs.

Groups of Monitors

Grouping monitors in accordance with host types and monitor types provides a convenient way to manage the monitoring system. For example, you can create a host group for each location and organize your hosts (servers) accordingly.

Available Monitor Types

Polling

Monitors are polled (checked) with a regularity specified by the user. By default, ‘Basic connectivity’ monitors are checked every 30 seconds, all the rest – every minute. A minimum interval between polls is limited to 1 second, but it is not recommended to use polling interval fewer than 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. Depending on returned value monitor stays in OK state or turn into one of two problem states:

1. Performance Warning
2. Down

IPHost Network Monitor reacts to monitor transitions to problem states by performing alerts assigned by the user to the corresponding state. The alerts are set in Alerting Rules.

Dependencies

You can make the monitor dependent 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. For example, you can make all the monitors in a subned dependent from PING monitor to a gateway to this subnet. By default, a monitor inherits its dependency setting from its parent host, the default dependency is PING monitor on its parent host.

Admin Tools

IPHost Network Monitor provides interfaces to some tools that help you to manage your hosts (servers) from the client GUI directly. There are:

1. SSH client
2. Telnet client
3. Remote Desktop client

You can configure the interfaces on Settings-> Admin Tools page. Also, you can also specify a path to device web interface on a host Main parameters tab.

Other features description: