Too many alerts jam up Host Monitor

[lr]

I have had several instances now where lots of alerts coming in rapidly (over a 100 within a short period), causes Host Monitor to either stop monitoring or if it does continue monitoring it stops sending emails and reports. I think I solved the problem of the complete stopping of monitoring by eliminating screen popup alerts. But I still have the problem of the email and reports stopping. I have solved this so far by stopping and restarting the Advanced Host Monitor service, then the emails and reports resume. I am using Windows 2000 Server to run Host Monitor and almost all tests are executed remotely by RMA.

Do you have any suggestions for improving this? I plan to move to Windows 2003 Server very soon, so maybe that OS will be more stable.

Thank you.

[KS-Soft]

Could you please provide more information:
1) Version of HostMonitor?
2) What kind of alerts do you use? "Send e-mail", "Generate reports" and some other?
3) Do you need to start all these alerts? Or some tests/alerts may depend on several major tests (e.g. router/network availability)?

About Windows 2003: IMHO Windows XP and Windows 2003 has more bugs than Windows 200 SP4

Regards
Alex

[lr]

1. My version is 4.60.
2. The actions giving me problems are "send email". I also generate an hourly report of all failed tests that gets emailed and it is also subject to this problem.
3. Just about all tests/alerts are dependent upon a successful "ping" test.

Do you recommend against Windows 2003 server over Windows 2000 server SP4?

[KS-Soft]

Just tested HostMonitor
- system: Windows 2000 SP4, Pentium 4, 512Mb memory
- created 160 tests
- assigned action profile with "Send e-mail" and "Generate reports" actions. "Generate reports" action creates 3 reports.
- fail all tests at the same time (using "reverse alert" option)

HostMonitor sent 160 e-mails and generated 480 reports (actually 3 reports, 160 times each of report) without any delay and without any problems.
Ok, there is some delay - HostMonitor used 99% of CPU for 5 sec. But everyting works fine. I tested it over and over

May be you are running some programs that hold too much system resources? And system cannot allocate all resources needed by HostMonitor?

[KS-Soft]

PS
You may disable "Show status window when sending mail" option, HostMonitor will use less resources

Regards
Alex

[timn]

Just a suggestion....

In our setup we have nearly 5,000 tests but alerts are somewhat nested. For example, I may have 20-40 tests on a single machine but none of them will run if the master test (a simple ping) for that machine fails.

So if that machine fails, I get 1 alert (the failed master ping) instead of 40.

Next, these machines are grouped into network segments and each of the individual machine master tests (the pings) are further dependent upon a network segment master test (for example, a ping of the router's interface for that segment). If the router or network switch goes down, I get 1 alert instead of 20 (20 machines in the segment) or worse 800 (20 machines x 40 tests/machine).

It's taken some work, but basically, for whatever problem occurs, I usually get no more than 10 alerts for most problems.

We do a lot of paging when something goes down and there's nothing more annoying than having your pager receive 450 pages....