

These settings are not just a matter of taste. The notification sounds can be configured as well. As with all settings, you can do this per host or use the default configuration for all hosts. You can specify the e-mail recipients on the next page. The Notifications page offers additional options to ensure that Ping Monitor doesn’t get on admins’ nerves with too many alerts.

For 24-hour monitoring, you will prefer the e-mail notifications. These notifications make sense if you run the tool on your own desktop. You can play a sound and display a balloon message on the machine that runs Ping Monitor. Ping Monitor supports three kinds of internal notifications. The Custom Actions page enables you to execute an application or script whenever Ping Monitor detects a certain condition, such as connection loss or connection restore. If you configured the tool to only send notifications in case of an outage (defined on the Monitoring page), you can use the last setting to stop or pause monitoring after a certain number of outages. If Ping Monitor is unable to establish a connection to the host during the timeout configured here, you can tell the tool to stop or pause monitoring. The settings on the Automation page are important to prevent Ping Monitor from continuously sending notifications to admins after problems on a host have been detected. This can be useful if a server is not always online. The Monitoring Intervals settings allow you to define the days and the hours when Ping Monitor checks the availability of the host. The main purpose of this setting is to prevent packets from circling the Internet forever. TTL determines the number of routers that an ICMP packet may pass before it is dropped. You can usually leave the default configuration for Packet Size and Time to Live (TTL). If you set a low number here, you might want to increase the Outage Condition to decrease the likelihood of a false positive-for instance, during temporary network issues. The Failed Pings Interval setting defines when Ping Monitor will send a new request after a failed ping. If the reply arrives in time, Ping Monitor will send the next ping after the Passed Pings Interval. The tool counts the number of failed pings and will report an outage whenever the number reaches the configuration in the Outage Condition field. The Ping Timeout specifies the time, in milliseconds, that Ping Monitor waits for a ping from the host after the echo request has been sent. If you don’t configure these settings correctly, you will generate many false positives. The ping options are important if you intend to use Ping Monitor to get notified when a server is down. Another way to manage multiple machines is to add them by IP range. If you work with many servers, you might want to add the host to a group (a new feature in version 5.0), which allows you to analyze and compare the availability of multiple hosts easily. Ping Monitor also supports dynamic IP addresses. You can work with either the host’s IP address or its DNS name.
