Failure and alerting process

Each alert is processed based on your monitor configuration settings. You can restrict or expand testing during each monitor state by adjusting the parameters in the Timing section.

The Notification Control settings determine how many test failures must occur before sending an alert, as well as the maximum number of alerts that will be sent.

Timing Settings: Delays Between Tests While

The following example illustrates how the Timing and Notification Control settings affect the failure and alerting process.

Alert	Setting
Up	30 seconds
Warn	30 seconds
Down	60 seconds
Lost	30 seconds

Notification Control

Notification	Accumulated Failures per Alert
Maximum Alerts to Send	3

The following table outlines changes in failure count and monitor state as the monitor progresses from a Warn to a Lost state. A monitor will advance from a Fail to a Lost state when the maximum number of alerts are processed.

Failure Count	State	Action	Time Elapsed
1	Warn	None	0:00
2	Warn	None	0:30
3	Fail	Alert	1:00
4	Fail	None	2:00
5	Fail	None	3:00
6	Fail	Alert	4:00
7	Fail	None	5:00
8	Fail	None	6:00
9	Fail	Alert	7:00
10	Lost	None	7:30

Preview the process with the downtime simulator

Each monitor includes a downtime simulator that simulates the alerting process from a configured start time and duration. Use the Downtime Simulator to process every action that can be triggered by the monitor across all alerts. The simulator can help you test the alert coverage for a monitor at a specific time of day.

Schedule alerts

Independent scheduling is supported on a per-action basis. The schedules are based on a seven-day calendar. You can configure the time periods in 15-minute blocks and schedule any combination of time interval you require.

This independent scheduling system provides you a high degree of flexibility. During your normal business hours, you can configure actions within the same alert to be sent directly to your email or pager so you can respond resolve the issue. Outside of normal business hours, you can run additional diagnostic scripts, automatically launch a recovery action, and log the event.

Seven-day availability calendar

The graphical availability screen displays your configured time intervals. The green blocks indicate active time periods. The gray blocks indicate the inactive time periods.

Click a day of the week or a time block to display the week-long calendar. You can toggle individual 15-minute intervals or entire horizontal rows. Click Morning or Afternoon to select the entire day or a portion of the day.

To choose another day of the week, click Select Day to Overwrite list to choose another day of the week. Click Copy to duplicate your settings and fill in the time blocks for the remaining days of the week.

Customize notifications with tokens

Using tokens (such as %date%), you can customize your alert actions. When ipMonitor executes an action, the tokens are replaced with dynamic content. When you configure your alert, use the Token List and Token Selector to build dynamic alert strings

Date, time, and formatting tokens

Insert the following tokens into your action notifications to obtain detailed date and time information.

Token Name	Description	Sample Return Value
%date%	Date (yy-mm-dd)	03-02-18
%dday%	Day (dd)	17
%mmon%	Month (mm)	07
%monthtext%	Month (full text)	January
%monthtext3%	Month (three letters)	Jan
%week%	Week in current month (one digit)	1
%weekday%	Weekday (one digit, Sunday = 0)	4
%weekdaytext%	Weekday (full text)	Friday
%weekdaytext3%	Weekday (three letters)	Fri
%year%	Year (yyyy)	2018
%yyear%	Year (yy)	04
%time%	Time (hh:mm::ss) based on 24-hour clock	20:25:28
%rfc822date%	Date/time in email format	Tue, 02 Mar 2018 20:25:28 -0500
%%	percent	%

Monitor information tokens

Insert the following tokens into your alerts to obtain monitor-specific information (such as Monitor Name, Type, Duration of Monitor failure, and so on).

Token Name	Description	Sample Return Value
%monitorid%	Monitor ID	589478484027
%monitorname%	Monitor Name	HTTp - Website
%monitortype%	Monitor Type	ado
%monitoravail%	Monitor available time (%)	99.95
%monitorcoverage%	Monitor coverage time (seconds)	174697
%monitorfailures%	Monitor Failures	0
%monitorcriticals%	Monitor Failures - Critical	0
%monitorcritstoalert%	Critical Alert	3
%monitorstatus%	Last Monitor Status	could not obtain an Ip address for the device;
%monitorlastrun%	Date / Time Monitor Last Run	Sun, 21 Dec 2018 17:29:10 -500
%monitordowndate%	Date / Time Monitor Reported Failure	Sun, 21 Dec 2018 17:29:10 -500
%monitormaxtest%	Maximum Test Duration (seconds)	300
%monitoralertmax%	Maximum Alerts to Send	3
%monitoralertno%	Alert Number	2
%monitoralertssent%	Number of Alerts Sent	1
%monitordownlength%	Duration of Monitor Failure	0.80 minutes
%monitoruplength%	Total Monitor Up Time	2 days, 2 hours, 2.70 min
%monitorstate%	Current Monitor State (text)	down
%monitorstatenum%	Current Monitor State (number)	1
%monitortestup%	Delay Between Tests While Up (seconds)	300
%monitortestwarn%	Delay Between Tests While Warn (seconds)	300
%monitortestdown%	Delay Between Tests While Down (seconds)	300
%monitortestlost%	Delay Between Tests While Lost (seconds)	300
%monitor[addr]% %monitor[port]% %monitor[target]% %monitor[info/logfile]%	Monitor Configuration Data from the Branch found in popup XML These may contain other values in the branch displayed using the popup XML feature. These fields are specific to the monitor.	10.25.0.10 53 INtrANETSRV Security
%monitortag[...]%	Value of Tag Name Specified. This will display the value of a custom tag for the specific monitor. The Name of the Tag is entered within the square brackets [ ].	Brian Smith, cell: 555-9876

Alert and action tokens

Insert the following tokens into your alerts to obtain alert-specific information.

Token Name	Description	Sample Return Value
%parentalertname%	Alert name that corresponds with the action.	Night Crew
%actionname%	Action name.	Internal Helpdesk - Simple Email
%action[sendmail/emailto]% %action[emailfrom]%	Specified configuration data for the action. This may contain other values in the branch displayed using the popup XML feature. These fields are specific to the action. In cases where the XML branch contains a list of values, only the first value is retrieved. For example: %alert[sendmail/emailto]%	admin@xyzcompany.com ipm7@xyzcompany.com
%actiontag[...]%	Value of the specified action tag. This displays the value of a custom tag for the specific action. The tag name is entered within the square brackets [ ].	http://intranet. xyzcompany.com/ recovery.aspx

System tokens

Insert the following tokens into your alerts to obtain system-specific information, such as the ipMonitor Server Name, CpU utilization by the ipMonitor process, available drive space, and so on.

Token Name	Description	Sample Return Value
%instancename%	ipMonitor Server Name	ipMonitor Server [pRIMARY]
%processcpu%	ipMonitor CpU Utilization	56.78 seconds
%processuptime%	ipMonitor Uptime	3.81 hours
%processavg%	ipMonitor CpU Load	0.40%
%sysmemavail%	physical Memory Available	359.83 MB
%sysswapavail%	Commit Memory Available	535.78 MB
%ipmdriveavail%	ipMonitor Drive-Space Available	26.15 GB

Content Generator token restrictions

The Content Generator can access %monitor[...]% and %monitortag[...]%, but cannot access %alert[...]% or %alerttag[...]%.