Introduction

This part describes how to use the alerting policies available in nVision. With alerting you can be notified in case of any problems in your network. When a host stops responding, when a service has a slower response or when some applications are having problems, nVision may send you a message, show the information on the screen, or even run a corrective action.

How it works

First, you have to define a set of events. The example of such an event is when a host stops responding. nVision will constantly monitor all hosts to check if any of the defined events took place on them. In our example the event will be raised when all services running on the host do not respond.

Now, we have an event but what should the program do with this event? We need to define a set of actions which can be run in case of the event happening. When events and actions are defined, then we can set alerts. The alert defines which actions should be executed if a specific event takes place.

All raised alerts are logged in the database so you could prepare reports about your network performance. If you would like to collect the information about a specific event, but you don’t want any actions to be executed, then you need to define an alert with this event but with no actions. It will tell nVision to just collect those events to the database.

Let’s summarize the process of setting the alert:

1.Create an event. The occurrence of such event will trigger an alert. Examples of events: host down, service performance problem, web page load time over a threshold, etc.

2.Create notification and corrective actions. You should create actions to be run when an event occurs. Example of actions: sending an e-mail or ICQ message, running an external application, restarting of Windows service, etc. This step is optional - you can create the alert without any action.

3.Create an alert. The alert defines which actions should be executed when a specific event occurs. When an alert is raised then the information about the event which triggered this alert will be stored to the program’s event log. Such information will be stored even if the alert has no actions.