Concepts

This topic discusses concepts related to alerting.

Event

nVision constantly monitors your network, all hosts and services. As you can imagine – it can detect when a specific service slows down or stops responding at all. It will also detect when a whole host stops responding. For such situations you can define an event to be raised. Every event has its beginning and end time. For example in case of the host-not-responding event, the end will be when the host starts to respond. So with nVision you know not only when an event starts, but also when it ends. What’s more, you can see a list of started events. For the purpose of this manual we call such events (that started and have not ended) open events.

You can also define your own events: let’s say that you have to monitor an MSSQL Server. Then it’s not enough to know how fast it responds to a simple request. You will most likely want to monitor several performance counters describing its current status to be able to react before any critical situation occurs. For example, when free RAM memory is low or in case of cache performance degradation. Such events can be raised before any unrecoverable error allowing you to correct this situation quickly and prevent any data or productivity loss it might cause.

All raised events are logged in the program’s event log. This allows making analyses of your network performance, for example to prepare reports showing the most problematic hosts or a report of the most frequent events.

Host status

Unlike in other similar products, host status in nVision is a calculated value, not a hard coded one. So you can define conditions when a host is considered to have status Up, Down or Warning. For more information about host status refer to Host status concept topic.

Action

You can define two general types of actions: notification and corrective. When an event occurs, nVision uses the action mechanism to notify the administrator about the problem or to run any external program to correct it. So before you define alerts, you need to define a set of actions which will be used to notify you.

You can define such actions as: e-mail, ICQ, pager or SMS message, sounds, dialog box and running an external program. For a complete list of available action types please read Action Types topic.

Alerts

Alert defines the program behavior in case of any network problems. First you select when the alert should be triggered - i.e. upon detecting a certain event. You also have to define which hosts should be checked for event occurrence. It can be defined directly for the host or at the atlas/map level. In such case the alert will be triggered if the event is raised on any host contained in the object for which an alert is defined (i.e. atlas, map or any descendant map).