Global heartbeat options are configured in the Heartbeat container where a variety heartbeat monitoring options that affect all hosts regardless of group membership are configured.
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 of host status changes. That is, it will generate one event whenever a host or TCP port goes from online to offline and vice versa. When enabled, configures 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, when heartbeat alerts are utilized, then this option should be checked so that the heartbeat service sends an email notification when the EventSentry service is not running. This option can be ignored if heartbeat information is only utilized in the web reports.
Default SSH Port: The SSH port to use when SSH credentials are configured for a host or group. SSH is only used for Non-windows hosts.
Database
Collects all data collected by the heartbeat agent in the selected database to provide current status as well as historical data. Data collected by the heartbeat agent includes:
•Current status of all monitored host indicators (ping, agent and/or TCP)
•All SNMP metrics, including performance and disk space
•System information of network devices
•VM inventory of VMWare hosts
•MAC to switch port mappings
Utilize Collector: If a collector is available and the heartbeat agent is installed on a network that does not have direct connectivity to the selected database, enabling this option will configure the heartbeat agent to send all data through the collector. This option is disabled by default and should only be enabled in MSP-style scenarios.
