Servers Alive

Needless to say that computers rely on power, and if it goes down, so does the corresponding service, server, or home PC. However, this is only one of many reasons why a connection can be suddenly interrupted, and is up to network administrators, and specialized applications like Servers Alive to monitor activity, and alert of any events.

The application doesn’t necessarily have to be installed on the server itself, but you do need to make sure that connection to it is always enabled for proper monitoring. You’re free to add more servers to the list, and even organize them in multiple categories, and sub-groups.

It can take a little time to add an item, but this is mostly because of the abundance of options at your disposal. First of all, general connection details like IP address, host ID, and special dependencies need to be configured, with steps later on requiring you to specify what exactly to look for, what notifications to send, and when to monitor. Servers can be loaded from an existing HOSTS file.

You can take the time to manually add all details to every server you want to monitor, but a great deal of time is skipped when adding new servers if you pay a visit to the setup menu. Here, you find a tree list of options to configure alerts, logging, output, general, and built-in servers.

Alerts allow you to set up the type of notification to send, as well as where these notifications end up. Given the right credentials, and connection details, you can enable SMTP email alerts, alpha paging, audio, MSN, XMPP, Twitter, SMPP, or executive alerts.

All data grabbed from monitoring can be saved to file for later analysis. There’s quite the variety of options, and you can choose to enable debugging, syslog, statistical, interchange data, RRD tools, or uptime logging.

Sure enough all of these details get triggered when matching values configured for each item. These can refer to a simple ping, TCP, UDP, DNS, or RADIUS protocols, NT services and processes, disk space, existing databases, external COM ports, and even virtual machine status.

The application constantly monitors all activity once you manually start the process. Different edit tools allow you to search for specific entries or items, import hosts, view entries, or remove them.

Last but not least, the application gives you the possibility to configure teams, and individuals which take part in the monitoring process. Most related details refer to contacts, so the application knows where, and if to send notifications, which is ideal for spreading out different tasks throughout the team.

To sum it up, Servers Alive is a powerful administration tool which can be heavily configured so it doesn’t miss a thing going on with active servers. Most effort on your behalf narrows down to filling in proper details, areas to monitor, and when to trigger, with the application letting you, and your team know whenever something goes wrong through different methods.