Monitors overview

WhatsUp Gold uses three types of monitors to gather information about and report on your network devices. In addition to the monitors applied to devices during discovery through device roles, you can configure supplementary monitors to gather the type of information you feel is necessary to successfully gauge your network's health.

• Active monitors poll target devices for information such as ping accessibility, device services, such as Web or email servers, and more. Active monitors regularly query or poll the device services for which they are configured and wait for responses. If a query is returned with an expected response, the queried service is considered "up." If a response is not received, or if the response is not expected, the queried service is considered "down" and a state change is issued on the device. Active monitors are configured in the Active Monitor Library. For more information, see Configuring Active Monitors.
• Passive monitors listen for device events. As active monitors actively query or poll devices for data, passive monitors passively listen for device events. Because passive monitors do not poll devices, they use less network bandwidth than active monitors.

  Passive monitors are useful because they gather information that goes beyond simple Up or Down service and device states by listening for a variety of events. For example, if you want to know when someone with improper credentials tries to access one of your SNMP-enabled devices, you can assign the default Authentication Failure passive monitor. The monitor listens for an authentication failure trap on the SNMP device, and logs these events to the SNMP Trap Log. If you assign an action to the monitor, every time the authentication failure trap is received, you are notified as soon as it happens.

  Although passive monitors are useful, you should not rely on them solely to monitor a device or service—passive monitors should be used in conjunction with active monitors. When used together, active and passive monitors make up a powerful and crucial component of 360-degree network management. Passive Monitors are configured in the Passive Monitor Library. For more information, see Configuring Passive Monitors.

• Performance monitors are the WhatsUp Gold feature responsible for gathering data about the performance components of the devices running on your network; for example, CPU and memory utilization. The data is then used to create reports that trend utilization and availability of these device components.

  WhatsUp Gold performance monitors gather data from the following device components:

  • CPU utilization
  • Disk utilization
  • Interface utilization
  • Interface traffic
  • Memory utilization
  • Ping availability
  • Ping response time

  Additionally, you can create custom performance monitors to track specific performance monitors for Active Script, APC UPS, PowerShell Scripting, Printer, SNMP, SQL Query, SSH, WMI Formatted, and WMI performance counters.

  Performance Monitors are configured in the Performance Monitor Library. For more information, see Working with Performance Monitors.

See Also Monitoring Devices Using Active Monitors Passive Monitor Library Using Performance Monitors Enabling global performance monitors Creating custom performance monitors Using the Active Script Performance Monitor