Defining Availability Monitors and Targets

You can monitor the PATROL Agents to verify that they are up and running by using the availability monitoring feature. You must specify the servers that monitor and the notification servers that are monitored. The following section provides some guidelines on availability monitoring.

Providing Redundancy

You must configure both a primary and a backup availability monitor. The backup availability monitor monitors only the availability of the primary availability monitor. If the primary availability monitor becomes unavailable, the backup availability monitor assumes monitoring until the primary availability monitor is available.

Using A vailability Monitors to Monitor Notification Servers

Do not make a notification server an availability monitor. The availability monitor must be a separate agent that only monitors the notification servers. In this arrangement, the notification server is considered an availability-monitoring target, which means that it is being monitored for availability.

Dedicated Computer Not Required

While the PATROL agent running on the availability monitoring machine must be dedicated to availability monitoring, the availability monitoring machine can perform other functions.

Maximum Number of Agents to Monitor

An availability monitor can monitor a maximum of 100 agents. If the availability monitor monitors more than 100 agents, it may not be able to ping with the frequency specified by the parameter AvailabilityMonitorColl.

Improving Performance

To improve the availability monitor performance, you must apply certain agent rules to the availability monitor. For more information, see Configuring the Availability Monitor Agent.

Tip

Availability checkers perform best on Unix machines and allow easier management of multiple agents running availability checkers on one machine.

Grouping Targets Logically

When setting up availability monitoring in your enterprise, group availability monitoring targets and monitors in a logical fashion. For example, you may want to group targets by geographical location so that when the availability monitor detects that a notification server is unavailable, you know immediately which servers are affected.

For more information about configuring availability monitoring, see Configuring Availability Monitoring.