Situations that can trigger Notifications

Point North Networks Server Monitor distinguishes between 3 status types for a sensor:

· OK (Green) means up and running

· WARNING (Yellow) means one request has failed or the request time was above the warning threshold

· DOWN (Red) means at least 2 requests have failed or were above the timeout threshold

There are five situations that can trigger a notification:

· On Error: This notification is triggered if a server goes down and is not available anymore (e.g. the sensor cannot connect to a service and runs into timeouts). The associated color is red.

· On Warning: Slow requests or user defined thresholds can trigger a warning notification. In this case a sensor is shown in yellow color

· On OK: If a sensor’s status changes from Error/DOWN or Warning to the UP status this notification is triggered (e.g. to let you know that a server is UP again)

· On Escalation: If a sensor has a DOWN state for a longer time you can trigger this additional notification. Most users let Point North Networks Server Monitor send out the first ERROR notification to a smaller team and then – if the problem is not solved e.g. in 5 minutes – a larger distribution list is notified using the escalation notification.

· On Change: Some sensors are able to monitor a service or file for changes in the content (e.g. the HTTP Advanced sensor can discover changes in a webpage). If such a change is discovered Point North Networks will trigger a change notification

To avoid receiving too many notifications for only very short failures or delays you can set so-called latencies. When latencies are set (a value in seconds) a notification is only sent if the failure state takes longer than the latency.

For example one configuration could look like this:

· Configure the latency for DOWN to 60 seconds

· Configure the latency for Escalations to 300 seconds

· Configure one notification just to send emails and ICQ message

· Select this notification for UP and DOWN

· Configure a second notification to additionally send an SMS/pager notification

· Select this notification for ESCALATION

Now if a sensor goes down you will be notified via email and ICQ about 1 minute after a sensor goes down. If after 5 minutes the sensor is still down you will additionally receive a SMS/Pager notification, e.g. in case you are away from your email client