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Setting General Options

Global Heartbeat Options

To set the global heartbeat options, click the "Global Options" container and select the "Heartbeat" tab. There you will be able to set the monitoring (polling) interval, whether you want to write events to the event log, and whether you want to write heartbeat information into the database.

All of the settings below apply to all computers in all groups and cannot be changed on a per-group or per-host level.

General

Monitoring Interval: This interval determines how often the monitored computers are being polled, in seconds.

Thread Management: The heartbeat agent uses threads to scan hosts in parallel. When set to automatic, the agent automatically calculates the number of threads to use based on the number of hosts that are being monitored as well as the time it takes to monitor the hosts. Depending on the actual scan speed, the agent will dynamically adapt the thread count and increase or decrease the thread count as needed. When set to manual, the agent will always use the number of threads specified in "Max # of threads", regardless of the number of hosts and scan speed. Regardless of this setting, the agent will never use more threads than there are hosts to monitor.

Max # of threads: With thread management set to automatic, specifies the maximum number of threads (upper limit) the agent will use. With thread management set to manual, specifies the number of threads the agent will use.

Event Log Logging

Logging Status Changes: You can optionally write status changes to the event log, so that you can be notified if a certain computers or service becomes unavailable. A positive status change applies when a computer or service was previously unreachable, but is now reachable again. A negative status change applies when a computer or service was previously reachable, but is not anymore. As such it is recommend to log negative status changes at least as warnings. See Event Log for all events logged by this feature.

When host is down, notify every: By default, the heartbeat service only notifies you when a host changes its status. That is, it will generate one event whenever a host or TCP port goes from online to offline and vice versa. If you check this box, then you can configure the heartbeat service to continuously generate an alert when a host, service or remote agent is down. The selected time interval will define how often these continuous alerts will be generated.

Notify if EventSentry service is unavailable: The heartbeat service relies on the EventSentry service to perform any immediate notifications, such as email or page notifications. This is because the heartbeat service logs all status alerts (e.g. when a host is unreachable) to the event log. As such, if you are making use of the heartbeat alerts, then you should check this option so that the heartbeat service notifies you via email when the EventSentry service is not running. You can ignore this option if you are only utilizing the heartbeat information in the web reports.

Log to ODBC Action

All status information is written to local HTML files in the Heartbeat subdirectory of your EventSentry installation directory. These files can be viewed in the management application by clicking on the "Computers" container in a heartbeat-enabled group.

If you are already using a database to consolidate event log records, then we recommend also writing heartbeat status and history information to this database. This will allow you to use additional reporting features not available in the HTML pages.

To write to a database check the "Record to database" checkbox and select an action from the drop down list.