About critical active monitors

Critical active monitors allow you to define a specific polling order for a device's active monitors; you can make one monitor dependent on another monitor on the same device, such as making an HTTP monitor dependent on the Ping monitor, so that you are not flooded with multiple alerts on the same device if network connectivity is lost.

In a critical monitor polling path, critical monitors are polled first. If you specify more than one critical monitor, you also specify the order in which they are polled. Critical monitors are "up" dependent on one another; if critical monitors return successful results, non-critical monitors are polled. If any of the critical monitors go down, all monitors behind it in the critical polling order are no longer polled and are placed in an unknown state for the duration of the polling cycle. If at the start of the next polling cycle, the critical monitor returns successful results, polling of successive critical monitors and non-critical monitors resumes.

Note: Up and Down device dependencies take precedence over critical monitor polling; if WhatsUp Gold detects device dependencies, the configured dependencies are respected.

When critical monitoring is enabled, and you specify a critical polling order, you now receive only one alert when a device loses its network connectivity.

Note: When a monitor is placed in the unknown state, assigned actions are not fired. Likewise, when a monitor comes out of the unknown state into an up state, assigned actions are not fired.

Only monitors that you specify as critical follow a specific polling order; non-critical monitors are not polled in any specific order. Additionally, if multiple non-critical monitors fail, all associated actions fire.

Critical active monitors can be viewed and configured from the Device Properties - Active Monitors dialog.

Critical_Active_Monitors_Dialog_v14

Note: Independent poll frequency for all monitors is ignored when a monitor is specified as critical.

See Also

Using Premium Active Monitors

Adding and editing an APC UPS Monitor

Monitoring mail servers

Monitoring a Microsoft Exchange Server

Getting Started with Exchange Monitors

Adding and Editing an Exchange Monitor

Example: Exchange Server monitor

Monitoring Microsoft Exchange 2003 Servers

Adding and editing a File Properties Monitor

Adding and editing a Folder Monitor

Adding and editing an FTP Monitor

Adding and editing an HTTP Content Monitor

Adding and editing a Network Statistics Monitor

Adding and editing a Power Supply Monitor

Adding and editing a Printer Monitor

Adding and editing a Process Monitor

Adding and editing a SQL Server Monitor

Adding and editing a SQL Query Monitor

Adding and Editing a WMI Monitor

Adding and editing a VoIP Monitor

Adding and editing an Active Script Active Monitor

Assigning active monitors

Removing and deleting active monitors

Group and Device active monitor reports