Generate alerts and notifications
ipMonitor uses a background process called a monitor to verify that a resource on a device is operating within a predetermined range. The resource can be any monitored statistic you enable on the device, such as physical memory, CPU, or device disk utilization.
When the resource reaches a critical range (for example, 95% CPU utilization), the monitor displays this information in the Dashboard. If you perform multiple roles within your organization and lack the resources to monitor all devices in the ipMonitor web user interface, you can configure ipMonitor to send you an email, text message, or another supported notification when a monitor reports a problem. This notification is called an alert.
About alerts
An alert is a collection of actions that act on behalf of a set of monitors. Administrators and departments can watch specific monitors and determine when and how they are alerted of monitor failures using alerts.
The alerts and suite of actions provide the required flexibility to accommodate many different types of notification methods and recovery actions.
Using the alert features, you can:
- Configure each alert to be responsible for a single monitor, multiple monitors, or groups or monitors.
- Link action types to scheduled alerts. For example, you can send a numeric message to a pager device that can receive SMS messages.
- Schedule each action independently.
- Specify escalated actions as problems remain uncorrected. For example, you can create an alert that alerts you when a server log file is full.
If the action occurs during normal business hours, notify the administrator first, and then attempt to resolve the problem using a recovery action (such as rebooting the server or restarting a service).
If the action occurs outside of normal business hours, attempt to fix the problem using a recovery action, and then contact the administrator if the recovery action fails.
How alerts work when a monitor detects a problem
When a monitor detects a problem (for example, the quality of service has degraded, a predefined threshold is passed, a specific content pattern is detected, or a connection failure occurs), the following events occur in sequence:
- Each alert is scanned to locate the alert assigned to the failed monitor and to the groups that include the monitor.
- The Alert Range is checked for each action within the alert to determine if the alert should be triggered.
- The Alert Schedule is checked to determine if the action is active for the current time period.
- The selected notifications for the alert are sent. If notifications are not selected, the action does not occur.
Escalating alerts
ipMonitor supports alert escalation. By controlling the number of monitor failures allowed to accumulate before triggering each action, you can share alerts with administrators in different areas of responsibility, between various recovery actions, or both. For example, you can create an alert that alerts you when a server log file is full.
Scheduling alerts
Use the Alert Wizard in the Alert List screen to walk you through the process of creating a simple email alert. You can schedule the alert based on a week-long calendar, as well as configure the time periods in 15-minute intervals.
Credentials
You can set different credentials for each action. This allows you to use specific credentials when executing certain actions that require authentication. Actions can also use the Windows account assigned to the ipMonitor service as their credential.
See the following sections for more information: