While the most important feature of any
server monitoring software is to
monitor your servers, the second most important one is to notify the system
administrator about any failures. ProtoMon can handle this quite well.
It supports different types of alerts and can fire them in almost any
combination. Double-click any monitor in the list and switch to the Alerts tab
to configure its alerts.
Here how the alerts work. When some monitor changes its status from normal to
failed, ProtoMon can generate any of the following alerts: show a pop-up
notification window, play a sound, send a notification e-mail message to
multiple recipients, or launch some application. If the Consequent Failures
option value is greater than one, the software will wait for the specified
number of failures in a row, before generating the alert. This allows you to
have precise failures statistics, but receive notifications only if monitor
remains down for the significant period of time.
By default, you will not receive any additional notifications about
failures. Because it's quite annoying to keep receiving the e-mails and closing
the pop-up windows when you already know about the failure and trying to fix it.
So if you received a single failure notification - your server is still down.
To get the repetitive notifications while your server remains down, check
the Repeat the alerts option and specify the desired interval.
When the monitor changes its status from failed back to normal, ProtoMon
will generate the alerts too. It can send an e-mail message, or launch some
application. You can specify the different applications to be launched on
monitor failure and recovery.
You can use the program's Preferences dialog to specify the general settings
for the e-mail, sound, and launcher notifications. Also you can override these
settings for any particular monitor using the Override Settings buttons
(see the screenshot above).
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