Registration Issues

I lost my license key, how do I recover it?

Note that you can normally see your license key by clicking “Help > About IPHost Network Monitor”.

If you can’t find your license key (a copy has been sent to you after purchasing a license), please contact technical support.

To help us to locate your license data promptly, please provide us with as much with the following data as possible:

• order ID (reference number)
• date of the order
• company name
• contact data (name and email used when placing order)

Can I use the same license key on several IPHost Network Monitor installations?

No, you can only use the provided license on a single computer.

Can I use the program on a computer not connected to Internet? How do I install the program and activate the key?

Yes, you can install and use the program even if there’s no Internet connection at the moment. The program can be registered by email afterwards.

Program Functionality

Can I access IPHost Network Monitor from remote computers?

If there’s a terminal server running on the computer where IPHost Network Monitor is installed, or a similar application providing remote desktop connectivity, you can connect to the computer via terminal client (or rdesktop or similar application) and perform whatever actions required.

Please refer to the relevant reference manuals on enabling remote desktop feature on your system.

Is it necessary to run network discovery after the program is upgraded?

If upgrade has been performed and no errors were detected, all the existing monitors and settings remain intact and continue to work. There’s no need in rediscovering under normal circumstances.

Note that you can schedule automated rediscovery from “Settings > Rediscovery” menu item.

How to upgrade the program so that all the settings and monitors are preserved?

Please refer to our Knowledge Base topic about an upgrade if you are running 3.* version of
IPHost Network Monitor (click “Help > About IPHost Network Monitor”).

Please stop the IPHost Network Monitor service and exit the client prior to upgrading.
It is recommended to make a backup copy of the program’s DB first (reference is required on how to do that).)

After that, run the installation executable file and attend to all the notices it can display. If advised, exit the installation, uninstall the program first (keeping the database) and run the installation file again.

How many monitors can be created with IPHost Network Monitor?

First, please refer to the description of available IPHost Monitor licenses. There are certain limits imposed on certain license types.

The trial version is limited to 500 running monitors. All features available in the Enterprise edition are supported during a 30-day trial.

Note that for the Enterprise license the actual limits are imposed by the operating system used and actual amount of resources (RAM, disk size and I/O speed, network throughput capacity) available. It is possible to run 200-1000 monitors on an average modern desktop computer without degrading significantly its speed.

Up to 5000-10000 monitors can be active if computer has modern enough hardware, used exclusively by IPHost Network Monitor (typical recommendations: CPU 2.5GHz, 4Gb RAM available, separate SATA 3/SSD drive for monitoring database). Please take a look at our guide on how to optimize IPHost Network Monitor installation for best performance.

Will the monitoring work after the 30-day trial period is over?

All the monitors created during the trial period will work when it’s over. However, the alerts become less informative; alerts will also have notifications on trial period having finished, links will be included to order page on the IPHost Network Monitor site.

Can the program be run as a system service under Windows 2000/XP/Vista?

IPHost Network Monitor installation consists of two parts: a system service, running in the background and actually performing the monitoring, and a client that can be run at any time to display stats and change settings for monitoring.

So, part of the software runs as a service. Note that we recommend closing IPHost GUI client if it’s unused, to free system resources. Monitoring tasks do not require running GUI client.

Can I monitor devices in separate networks from the single IPHost Network Monitor instance?

Yes. First, if the computer IPHost Network Monitor runs on is connected to several networks directly, you can access any device available.

You can also install and use Remote Network Agents to monitor devices in other networks.

Can a report be created for a definite period only?

Yes. Please click on “Open in Browser” button in report view. In the browser windows opened, select the dates to define the report period and click on “Generate”.

Does IPHost Network Monitor scan devices available via TFTP/SFTP protocols?

When you create a FTP monitor, there’s a checkbox indicating that SFTP protocol should be used. TFTP support isn’t available at this time.

How can MySQL database be monitored with IPHost Network Monitor?

There are several ways to monitor a MySQL database. First, you can create a regular MySQL Database monitor.

You can also use ODBC Database monitor, if there’s an ODBC defined for the MySQL database to monitor.

Using “Script or Program” monitor, you can run Nagios check_mysql plugin to monitor the MySQL database.

Finally, using (Remote) Script or Program monitor, you can start a script or program of your choice to connect to the database server and run whatever monitoring queries required.

Is it possible to monitor the size of a file opened by an application?

You can monitor size of a file opened by another application; however, the actual file size reported by the operating system may differ from the actual size, it depends on the applications using it. Certain applications may not update file size immediately.

We have printers, faxes etc. in our network – can we monitor such devices?

In most cases, yes. If the device has its own connection to the network, it most probably support Telnet, HTTP and/or SNMP to access and control the device.

If the devices is connected to a computer and has no network connection of its own, such monitors as WMI,

SNMP, Remote Script or Program to access the device’s host computer and get all the data from it.

How can the program log be cleared?

Enter the corresponding settings page (“Settings > Monitoring”) and lower the number of days to keep logs for. The older logs will get erased after monitoring service performs daily maintenance tasks (at or around 4am local time).

Can I send alert to several different email addresses, and/or to email and SMS simultaneously?

Yes. Note that you can add several comma- or semicolon-separated email addresses to To:/Cc: fields when creating a “Send mail” simple action for alert.

When creating an Monitoring Alerting Rule, you can add as many Alerts to invoke as required. Thus you can use all the supported notification means simultaneously.

Can I monitor server blocked by firewall?

Yes. Instead of creating a “hole” in the firewall, you can use Remote Network Agents to run inside firewalls and connect to the IPHost Network Monitor primary installation to pass monitoring data.

How can I backup/restore IPHost Network Monitor database and/or settings?

There are no built-in tools to handle this; database can be backed up using Firebird gbak standard utility; look into “C:\Program Files\IPHost Network Monitor\firebird\bin\” to find it.

Note that backup is created on a daily basis at approx. 4:00am; backup file is named nms.gbak and is located at the same directory where monitoring database file is located; the path to it can be found at “Settings > System” pane.

What filesystems does IPHost Network Monitor work with (e.g. monitoring files on FAT, NTFS, HFS, UDF etc.)?

When monitoring a file on local computer, all the supported filesystems will do.

When monitoring files on remote resources, it doesn’t matter what kind of filesystem is used there, as long as the resources can be accessed and file attributes read.

Can I save, print, convert to a different format IPHost Network Monitor reports and/or alerts?

Yes. Click on “Link to summary report” in the Properties section. You can create whatever report is necessary, using the provided controls, and print it afterwards. You can also print the monitoring report to a file and make whatever conversion possible afterwards.

If you have a question that is not answered here, please e-mail us or use the support form