Templates categories
Application template is a collection of predefined monitors to be created at once. Instances of such templates are called applications; each application has its own node in a main tree. Application monitors perform in-depth checks for a particular type of host or application. For example, there are templates for a generic Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Apache and IIS web servers, Oracle database server and so on. Application templates are intended to help you creating and maintaining your monitoring system.
An application template can be used in a discovery process. The Discovery Wizard allows to select application templates to be searched for. Each application template contains a set of conditions that define how to process the application during discovery. If these conditions are satisfied the application template is applied to the host.
There are several template categories predefined; apart from existing templates, you can easily define new ones. Please take a look at a section with application templates of our Application Templates Community where you can upload your own application template or download application templates of other users.
Template categories list
Template categories description
The below templates categories are predefined:
Server Health Checks templates contain common monitor types that can be used to get a general server health result. Failure of any of the recommended monitors, after their performance values are adjusted to required conditions, should be treated as immediate call for action, necessity to solve the reported problem as fast as possible.
Domain Controllers templates allow to check Windows domain implementation, its basic functionality and capabilities. Domains are used not only to provide authentication, but also to support data exchange and other services; problem state of any of them might bring the whole local network to a halt.
Mail Servers templates check availability and security features of mail servers – common set using SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 protocols, as well as MS Exchange.
Web Servers templates allow to watch the general health and state variables of different Web servers (such as checking connections number, resources utilization, etc). Try to utilize as specific template as possible (i.e., use generic template only if working with Web server not listed in this category).
Database Servers templates cover verifying various database engines (MySQL, MS SQL etc), checking their state parameters as well as general connectivity and health.
Virtual Machines templates check host and guest state/consistency; note that checking guests doesn’t mean accessing virtual machine in regular manner, as physical computer: for this particular case a virtual machine is treated as an application running on the hypervisor host.
Other Applications And Services templates include all the services not otherwise mentioned in the above categories, such as SharePoint or Memcached.
Monitoring use cases
- templates include typical monitors set; every built-in template name defines the cases where the template is best applicable – try the best match first, otherwise use generic template
- if no existing template fits your needs, you can define a new template, and include specific monitors set into it; give template a name clearly identifying its purpose
Monitoring tips
- if your mail services used to deliver email IPHost alerts are using domain authentication, then you might be in trouble if domain authentication fails; for that purpose, it is recommended to install local mail server on computer running IPHost monitor, as secondary; for the same reason do not use intranet email as primary notification service, use external email instead
- make sure you have two independent outgoing mail servers (MTAs), so that a message could have higher delivery chances, if one of the servers is either down, or inaccessible; using the mentioned locally installed MTA can provide you with fallback mail server, storing a copy of every monitoring message
- although there are monitors testing secure data transfer over SSL v2/v3, use the mentioned only for legacy devices, using out-of-date services; try to use only the most safe ciphers, see Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator or similar reference services
- when checking resources usage for services like Web servers, Database servers, try to avoid polling too frequently, especially on production servers; for example, if using a query to check database consistency, use as simple query as possible and avoid running it too often
- make cheaper to use/access resources: state of service to be monitored can be checked by regularly updating simple to access resource, such as text file: reading that file might be much less resource-intensive than performing actual service checks; for example, command-line MySQL utility can run simple checks and output results into a text file readable on local file system: checking that file can be significantly faster
- if running IPHost on virtual machine, make sure to have a second IPHost installation installed elsewhere, checking health of that VM: otherwise, if VM or its host fails, monitoring notices stop to arrive
