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ipMonitor's Live Reports allow you to proactively monitor availability and performance quality for any resource on your network.

The Group Status screen, conveniently located in the Admin Dashboard, allows you to view a summary of all Groups currently available in your ipMonitor installation. To view details pertaining to individual Monitors within a Group, you can click on the Group Name to access the Live Reports Details View.

Seven columns are visible by default within the Details View screen, allowing you to:

• Immediately spot problems using the color-coded status icons.
• Obtain detailed information regarding the Monitor's recent activity, such as how long it's been enabled and how much time has passed since it last encountered a problem.
• View the result of the last test performed by the Monitor.

Most of this information is also available by default in the Live Reports NOC View.

This article provides in-depth information on each of the seven default Monitor data columns. It is specifically designed to help you better interpret the information displayed by default in Live Reports.

Click the PDF icon to open a printable PDF version of this tutorial. It includes all the information found here, including images from the ipMonitor software, diagrams, and links to additional resources.

The Status column shows the current state of the Monitor using a color-coded icon and a textual description.

Monitors have five operational states and a disabled state, as shown below.

ICON	MONITOR STATE	EXPLANATION
	Up Listening	The server / device is responding as expected or ipMonitor is listening for inbound SNMP Traps.
	Warn	Indicates an unexpected result. Testing is in progress, but no Alerts have been triggered.
	Down	Alerts are being sent. A Monitor will progress from a Fail state to a Lost state when the maximum number of Alerts has been processed.
	Lost	The monitored resource continues to be in an error state. All configured Alerts have been sent.
	Uninitialized Suspended Disabled In Maintenance	The Monitor has not yet been initialized, is suspended, disabled or currently in Maintenance mode.

TIP In addition to displaying Group and Monitor state information in Live Reports, ipMonitor maintains live state information throughout its configuration screens. At a glance, you always know the status of resources you are testing.

The Monitor Name column displays the unique name assigned to the Monitor by the Administrator who created it. Since ipMonitor does not use the name field to identify the Monitor internally, Monitor Names can be changed at any time without data loss. To edit a Monitor's settings, simply click on the Monitor Name to launch the Edit Monitor screen.

TIP If enhanced security is required in your environment, you can mask Monitor Names by configuring ipMonitor to display Monitor ID numbers instead. For more information, refer to the tutorial titled How To Configure User Account Permission Levels.

The Type column shows the type of Monitor configured. ipMonitor provides in-depth monitoring capabilities via more than 50 different Monitor types. These include Quality Assurance Monitors, Windows Monitors, Resource Monitors, SNMP Monitors and Uptime Monitors.

For easy identification, this column displays the specific Monitor type configured to test a resource.

The Last Result column shows the result of the last test performed by the Monitor. When the Monitor is in an Up state, the information displayed shows the result received from the resource being monitored. When the Monitor is in a Warn, Down, or Lost state, the Last Result column indicates the problem encountered.

Note: Different Monitor types generate specific Test Results and Error Codes in accordance with the technical capabilities of that Monitor.

TIP For detailed explanations of the various Test Results and Error Codes reported, refer to the Administrator's Guide section pertaining to the relevant Monitor type.

The Availability, Coverage and State Change columns all display vital information regarding the overall performance of the Monitor. The three values are connected, and should be analyzed as such.

• The Availability column shows the percentage of the Coverage time that the Monitor has been in the Up state.
• The Coverage column shows the total length of time ipMonitor has been monitoring the resource. Coverage specifically excludes any period when the Monitor is suspended, disabled, or in maintenance mode. This value is reset when ipMonitor is restarted.
• The State Change column shows the length of time that has passed since the Monitor changed operational states. This includes time elapsed since scheduled maintenance.

The following diagram illustrates the way these three Intrinsic Property values are calculated.

Assuming that it is now 12:00 PM and the Monitor was first enabled at 12:00 AM, the above diagram shows that:

1. The Monitor has been enabled for 12 hours. During that time, it was not suspended or placed in maintenance. This total is recorded in the Coverage column.
2. During the time the Monitor was enabled, it was in a Warn state for approximately 35 minutes, Down for approximately 2 hours and Lost for approximately 25 minutes. When totaled, these periods amount to 3 hours (25%) of the entire Coverage time recorded (12 hours). The Availability column, then, shows that the Monitor was available for 75% of the time.
3. The Monitor recovered at 6:00 o'clock, exactly 6 hours ago. Since that was the last time ipMonitor recorded any change in the Monitor's status, this length of time is appropriately recorded in the State Change column.

For information on other features and concepts related to those discussed in this article, refer to the following ipMonitor resources:

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Last Updated: October 23, 2006 | What did you think of this topic?