Introduction

SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight monitoring solution that provides IT monitoring for up to 2500 network devices, servers, and applications. The dashboard provides visibility into the status of your devices, CPU, memory, and disk usage, as well as performance issues with critical services and processes.

Alerts and notifications

The application includes alerts and notifications that notify you in the event of trouble and automatically recover critical applications, servers and infrastructure devices whenever possible. If a failure occurs, you can configure ipMonitor to automatically take corrective actions, such as restarting services, rebooting servers, or executing scripts.

The installation includes a built-in database and web server, helping eliminate additional costs required by third-party products.

Monitor types

The application includes several monitor types that help you monitor the health of your critical network resources, tracking their availability, responsiveness, and performance. These resources include:

• Businesses and web applications, such as SQL databases, web servers, commerce, and mail servers
• Infrastructure equipment, such as server computers, switches, routers, and power backup systems
• Services, including IP-based services and Microsoft Windows services

Each monitor allows you to set operating environment variables. Alerts use these variables when a problem is detected. When a failure occurs, ipMonitor can:

• Restart the failed application, perform diagnostics, back up files, and run scripts
• Reboot the server or workstation
• Restart a list of services on a specific remote machine, including services with dependencies

Reports

The application includes several reports that provide in-depth visual analysis of your monitor statistics with detailed reports. These reports include:

• Dashboard and Network Operation Center (NOC) views that provide reports for all personnel who manage the network
• Configurable data analysis reports in graphical and tabular formats
• Reports with instance access to statistics recorded by any monitor or group
• Reports that explore the database of test results to identify the error messages that triggered alerts

Web console

The main toolbar is located at the top of the console. This toolbar provides access to all settings, resources, and options in the application.

Option	Description
Dashboard	Displays event data from selected resources (such as monitors and devices) in your network.
Devices	Displays the status of selected devices and monitors in your network.
Reports	Displays a list of configurable reports that provide detailed monitoring data about the devices and monitors in your network.
Configuration	Provides access to all configurable configuration settings, tools, and tasks.
Help	Provides access to THWACK, online help, SolarWinds contact information, and the About screen that lists the version and number of remaining monitors in your license.

SolarWinds Snap Collector

Beginning in 11.1, ipMonitor includes the SolarWinds Snap Collector. Based on the Intel Snap Telemetry Framework, the collector provides a simple method to collect, process, and publish system data through a single API.

For example, when you create a VMware monitor, the ipMonitor Service uses the collector to retrieve system data from a VMware host system, process the data, and report the data back to the service. This data displays in the web interface and selected reports.

The collector is installed on the ipMonitor server when you install or upgrade ipMonitor.

Collector architecture

The collector incorporates a modular architecture that includes the following components:

• SWIsnap, which manages the plug-ins and schedules tasks
• Plug-ins that perform actions scheduled by the collector tasks

The collector enables a plug-in as a separate process when required by a task. When all job requests are completed, the task stops and the plug-in process terminates.

Plug-in types

The plug-ins include collectors, streaming collectors, processors, and publishers. Each plug-in is a separate process started by a snap task.

Collectors gather data from monitored systems or applications when requested by a task. The data is collected based on a schedule—for example, every minute.

Streaming collectors gather data from the monitored systems. They are not based on a schedule determined by task, but return data when the data is available.

Processors perform processing on data provided by collectors—for example, calculating an average. The processing is completed before the data is passed to publishers.

Publishers send or upload the data to a reporting system, such as ipMonitor.