Knowledge Center > Tutorials

Adding a new Monitor to your installation is a simple process in ipMonitor. To quickly become familiar with the steps required to create and configure a new Monitor, we recommend setting up a HTTP Monitor to test your web server's availability and responsiveness.

The HTTP Monitor is typically used to ensure that the web server can:

• Communicate with ipMonitor via the HTTP protocol.
• Respond within a required number of seconds.

Used in combination with ipMonitor's flexible Alerts, continually monitoring your web server ensures that if problems are detected, you or your staff will be notified before your customers are affected.

This tutorial assumes that your computer meets the minimum requirements to run ipMonitor 8, and that you have the ipMonitor software currently installed on your system.

If you use log analysis or web analytics software, the HTTP Monitor may cause hits to be generated. Refer to your log analysis software for information regarding how to exclude the Monitor from analysis.

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.

To create a new HTTP Monitor, proceed with the following:

1. Click the Monitors menu option.
2. Click Add a Monitor.
3. Choose the HTTP Monitor from the Low Bandwidth category.

1. Enter a unique, descriptive name for the Monitor in the Name field.
2. Check the Enabled checkbox.
3. Choose whether you want the Monitor to store statistics for Recent Activity and Historical Reports.

4. Specify the location of the web server you want to monitor.

TIP Both IP Address and Domain Name are valid entries; however, entering an IP Address will eliminate any variables introduced by performing a lookup on the DNS server. If entering an IP Address, ensure that the web site in question is not configured to use a Host Header Name.

At this point, you can click the OK button at the bottom of the page to create your new Monitor.

In addition to the basic configuration outlined above, several optional settings are also available when configuring the HTTP Monitor:

1. If needed, specify a different TCP Port number. By default, the standard Port number used by HTTP Servers (Port 80) is already entered.
2. By default, the HTTP Monitor will retrieve the web page using a GET request. Select the Use HEAD request to save on bandwidth option to have the HTTP Monitor obtain Meta information about the resource identified by the Request-URI without transferring the Body itself.
3. To monitor the HTTP Server through your organization's Proxy Server, check the Force communication through an HTTP Proxy Server option.

TIP Before you select the option to Force communication through an HTTP Proxy Server, first ensure ipMonitor's global System Communication Settings have been correctly configured to permit communications with your proxy server. For more information, please refer to the Server Settings section of the Context Sensitive Help system.

For more information regarding the HTTP Monitor, refer to the Monitors section of ipMonitor's Context Sensitive Help system, then select Monitor Types, followed by HTTP. The Context-Sensitive Help can be accessed by clicking the Help link located in the top right corner of ipMonitor's Administration web interface.

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: July 13, 2006 | What did you think of this topic?