Downtime Simulator example of an IIS restart

You can use alert ranges to escalate an action to another administrator or automatically take corrective action when a problem is not resolved in a reasonable amount of time. For example, when you use an HTTP monitor on a Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) server, the following results occur:

• ipMonitor sends an email to notify the web administrator of the problem.
• The IIS service is automatically restarted if the administrator does not respond in a timely manner.
• The administrator receives an email indicating if the web server has recovered. This action occurs when Send Recovery Notifications is enabled for the email action.

Below is an example of an IIS restart in the Downtime Simulator.

The bold text indicates a problem with the action. Viewing each of the failure notifications sent by the monitor in this simulation, notice that the Restart IIS action is displayed in bold. The Enable Recovery Action option is selected, and is scheduled for availability at this time. However, the action is not queued because its Alert Range value is out of range.

The monitor states the Maximum Alerts to Send value is 3.

The problem is in the alert range for the Restart IIS alert, which is set to 9.

To ensure the proper alert escalation occurs, reset the Maximum Alerts to Send value to 9.