How monitors work

When you scan your network, the Discovery Engine pulls in all devices and makes some out-of-the-box decisions about what types of monitors to attach to each device. It bases its decisions by polling the device for management protocols (such as WMI and SNMP). After it scans those management protocols, it figures out what is running on the device and attaches monitors to those components.

Testing methods vary depending on the monitor capabilities and the test parameters you specify during the monitor configuration.

Incorporating flexible timing parameters allow you to intensify or lessen testing during each monitor state. Each time a monitor test fails, the sequential failure count is incremented and checked against the configured number of failures allowed before generating an alert. A successful test resets the sequential failure count to zero.

When a monitor reaches its maximum number of test failures, it will trigger an alert causing the following series of events to take place:

• Each alert is scanned to see if the monitor belongs to it.
• If yes, action parameters and action schedules are checked for actions within the alert.
• Any active actions are carried out.