Introduction

Thank you for purchasing MKS AlertCentre™, a cost-effective, easy-to-use monitoring solution for ensuring the high availability of networks, applications, and Internet/Intranet-based information systems. Built on an integrated foundation for scheduling, alerting, and automating repairs, AlertCentre lets you define monitors that can observe, report on, and control the activities of other programs or devices on your network so that you can be sure that mission-critical applications are up and running at all times. AlertCentre gives you and your colleagues the ability to be notified in a timely fashion if anything on your network is malfunctioning.

AlertCentre Features

The majority of the following features will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters.

• Easy Installation and Configuration. AlertCentre installs and is ready to use in less than 30 minutes. Configuration is simple and is done via a graphical user interface (GUI).
• Dual User Interfaces. AlertCentre offers both browser and Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interfaces. AlertCentre's HTML-based interface runs in any browser window, so you can manage your site over your LAN, WAN, or from any Web-aware workstation or device.
• Remote Monitoring. AlertCentre is built around the ability to monitor any machine or device without requiring agents on the remote machines. This reduces your deployment and maintenance costs, while letting you monitor remote devices and IT resources from any Web-aware workstation or device.
• Easy Customization. While designed to work out of the box with a wide array of predefined monitors, AlertCentre is also easy to customize. You can configure monitor behavior via the graphical user interface, organize your monitors into easy-to-manage groups, and create custom monitors. Using custom monitors, you can plug-in existing custom scripts to create your own monitor types and still benefit from AlertCentre's built-in action and alerting capabilities.

Because AlertCentre is built on MKS Toolkit, you have the full resources of the powerful MKS Toolkit scripting languages including Perl, KornShell, TCL, awk, and C Shell to customize and evolve your monitoring. AlertCentre is also fully extensible via native Microsoft technologies such as the Windows Script Host.

• Powerful Alerting, Escalation, and Corrective Action. AlertCentre automatically triggers actions to be taken upon failures or system events. Using these actions, you can alert people of failures and critical system status through e-mail, cell phone, pager, SNMP trap, or your own custom actions. AlertCentre also lets you implement an escalation process to notify the right people and take appropriate action based on the severity of a problem. And AlertCentre can trigger monitors, scripts, and programs as actions, letting you take automated corrective action.
• Built-in Redundancy. AlertCentre provides the ability to monitor the monitors, to help ensure that your critical resources stay available and that your business continues to run non-stop.
• Batch Jobs. In addition to monitors, AlertCentre enables you to create and schedule batch jobs, for automating routine tasks such as nightly builds and backups.

About This Manual

This manual describes AlertCentre and its features, tells how to get started monitoring, and then goes into more detailed topics that you can refer to as you get more experience in using AlertCentre.

This manual contains the following chapters:

• "AlertCentre Overview" discusses the basic system architecture and gives a high-level overview of AlertCentre concepts and features.
• "Getting Started" discusses initial AlertCentre configuration, the fundamentals of the user interface, and walks you through the creation of a simple monitor.
• "Schedules" discusses how to cause monitors and jobs to run at various times.
• "Actions, Alerts, and Escalation" discusses how to be notified when a monitor succeeds or fails, and how to establish an escalation process.
• "Monitors and Batch Jobs" discusses the details of setting up tasks to monitor and automate your system.
• "Monitoring Solution Wizards" discusses the wizards provided by AlertCentre to automatically set up monitors for various applications, devices, and system services.
• "Reports" discusses reports that can be produced with AlertCentre.
• "Customizing AlertCentre" discusses the flexibility of AlertCentre and how you can tailor it to provide custom actions and monitors.
• "Monitoring Station Partners" discusses setting up backup monitoring stations to take over should the primary fail or become unavailable.
• "Security" discusses various aspects of AlertCentre security.
• "Housekeeping" discusses system configuration and routine maintenance tasks.