EMCO Ping Monitor - Getting Started

This tutorial can be helpful for everyone who wants to get a closer look at EMCO Ping Monitor. It will give you a quick overview of the application, its basic features and also show how they can be used in the real-life situations. After reading this tutorial you will know what EMCO Ping Monitor can do and how to use it.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Application at a Glance
• Configuring Monitoring and Notifications Settings
• Host Monitoring
• Using Custom and Terminate Actions

Introduction

The easiest way to detect if a particular host is reachable across an IP network is to use command-line ping utility. It not only allows testing connection with a host, but also helping to estimate basic connection quality parameters by estimating round-trip time of network packets. Ping command-line utility is effective to check connection with a particular host at the current moment, but have a lack of functionality to track connections with multiple hosts during a long time period.

EMCO Ping Monitor uses the same simple approach to check connection with a network host as a ping utility, but it was specially designed to make a continuous monitoring of connections with multiple hosts simultaneously. It can work on background and track connection to your web server, mail server, DNS server and other critical network devices and will notify you in case of problems.

Application at a Glance

Let's take a look at the main application screen to familiarize with the user interface. As you can see, the application is based on the Ribbon interface and has a few functionality areas.

At the top of the main screen you can find the Ribbon bar. It provides an access to main application actions, for example, starting and stopping of monitoring, adding and removing hosts, etc. Under it the Monitored Hosts area is located. It's the main working area of the application, that displays connection status and ping statistics for monitored hosts. Information, displayed on the Monitored Hosts area can be switched to different presentation modes using switches, available on the toolbar. According to your personal preferences and a current task, you switch between table view presentation and one of card view presentation modes.

Under the Monitored Hosts area you can find three information panes. The Host Details pane displays actions configuration for host, selected in the Monitored Hosts area. If no hosts are selected, it shows a total number of hosts. The Terminate Actions expandable group is used for configuration of actions to be executed if connection to all monitored hosts is lost or not retrieved. Finally, at the bottom, you can see the Application Log view. This view is used to provide detailed log information about all detected events and performed actions. This powerful view can be customized through application preferences.

Configuring Monitoring and Notifications Settings

In scope of this tutorial let's setup monitoring of multiple hosts, for example, google.com and yahoo.com and other that you need. In this case Ping Monitor will continuously check connection to these hosts and will notify about connection quality and status changes. In order to start, click on the Add Host button, located on the Ribbon bar. In the appeared Add Host dialog enter host name into the Address field and press OK button to add host. As the result, configured host appeared in the Monitored Hosts area. Repeat this procedure in order to add other hosts.

Once hosts are configured, you can launch monitoring process, but first of all let's check monitoring settings and apply some changes. To access application settings, click on the Application button, located in the left top corner of the window, and press Preferences button. In the appeared Preferences dialog select Monitoring Settings to open page with monitoring configuration. The first parameter is Ping Timeout - a ping response waiting time from the monitored host. If during this time host doesn't send a response, a ping is considered as a failed. If few pings are failed in a row - it's a signal of connection outage. The second parameter Outage Condition defines a number of pings that should be failed in a row to report a connection loss. Finally, you can change intervals between passed and failed pings to define how often pings should be sent. Default monitoring settings are fine for this tutorial, so don't change them.

When connection outage is happened, a host icon in the Monitored Hosts area is changed to show that there is no connection with host at the current moment. Also, monitoring statistics and log are updated. If you plan to use Ping Monitor in 24x7 mode, in addition to on-screen messages you can setup e-mail and System Tray notifications to get information about connection status changes when you work with other applications or are out of the office. To setup them switch to the Notifications page on the Preferences dialog. You can choose events on which e-mail messages should be sent and balloon tips should be shown. Select all options to get notification on all events and press Apply button.

It's important to not forget to configure e-mail account, through which e-mail messages will be sent, otherwise you will not receive e-mail notifications. In order to do this switch to the E-mail Options page and specify required settings. Click on the link at the bottom to check entered settings and press Apply button to save configuration. You have finished configuration, so press OK button to close Preferences dialog.

Host Monitoring

You have completed all preoperational steps and now can launch hosts monitoring. Monitoring of all configured hosts can be launched by pressing the Start button on the Ribbon bar. Once monitoring has been started, you can check Monitored Hosts area to see live statistics. It includes information about uptime, pings and outages, etc. As configured in monitoring settings, you should get System Tray and e-mail notifications about connection status changes and regular ping reports.

To let Ping Monitor work on background, you can minimize it to the System Tray. If you like to keep it continuously running, you need to apply specific settings to launch application and monitoring after a system restart. On the Preferences dialog open the Automation page and select Run monitoring on application start up option. This option allows launching hosts monitoring on application restart. To run Ping Monitor on a system restart you can add it into Windows Autostart or use correspondent option, available on the General Settings page of the Preferences dialog. Also, if you would like to minimize application to the System Tray on start up, you can select Minimize on start up option on the System Tray page in application preferences.

Using Custom and Terminate Actions

Ping Monitor offers advanced features for handling of connection status change events. You can configure application to launch custom actions when connection to hosts is lost or restored. In the Professional edition of Ping Monitor you can configure own actions for every monitored host. To configure action stop hosts monitoring, select required entry in the Monitored Hosts area and choose the Edit Host in the context menu. In the appeared Edit Host dialog you can override global actions applied for all hosts by selecting Override actions configuration option. At the next step you need to choose options to specify action for connection lost and restore events and enter a command-line action. You can specify any command-line operation, which will be recognized by the system and can use various application placeholders as parameters.

Using placeholders allows passing an important information about event into the handler. Thus, an external script or application can know host name, connection status, etc. One of the examples of such custom handler can be SMS system that accepts various events from Ping Monitor to deliver SMS messages to recipients. To prevent messages delivery at night, for example, you can select an option to set a timeline for custom action execution. When custom actions and all settings are defined, you can press OK button to apply changes.

Terminate actions are global for all monitored hosts. Using terminate actions you can select one of predefined operations to be executed when connection to all hosts is lost or cannot be retrieved. It is useful, for example, when you need to shutdown PC, where Ping Monitor is running, if connection to all hosts was lost. Terminate actions can be configured on the Terminate Actions expandable group. To configure an action, select event, specify required operation and execution timeout. Application will execute configured operation automatically after a specified timeout from the time when event will be detected if during this time no changes will happen with monitored connections.