SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a popular protocol family, supported by majority of network devices, as well as available for every more or less popular operating system. One of most useful features of modern SNMP servers implementations is user-defined extensions. Simply put, one can instruct SNMP server to hold data returned by any user-defined action (such as output printed by a script or program). That can be used to use SNMP as container protocol, to deliver whatever data you need.

Most of existing IPHost monitor types are passive, meaning they are being polled by IPHost – directly, or via remote network agent. There are two “active” monitors, that perform “Event” type alert, when receiving data from remote host: Syslog monitor and SNMP Generic Trap monitor. Although it’s not possible to transform all possible passive monitors to active, there are several approaches to make monitoring nearly real-time in certain situations.

In most cases, monitoring is often viewed as pretty dumb alarm system – built to notify if something goes wrong. However, there could be cases when monitoring software can be used not so straightforward, or apply non-obvious settings or means to handle the task. Some of them are listed below. If you can think of any other case, please let us know in the comments form in the bottom.