Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IPHost

Introducing IPHost mobile client

We are glad to introduce IPHost mobile app (currently available for Android 4.4 or newer). To start using Push notifications on your Android device(s), please upgrade your IPHost installation to v5.3 or later version. You would also need an Android mobile device running free IPHost mobile app. We have added a quick start reference for IPHost mobile app; it typically takes less than 5 minutes to install the app, connect it to the IPHost desktop installation and commence receiving Push notifications.

Using alternate PING utilities to test your network

Low latency networks are the ideal media; in typical intranet all the hosts can be reached in a few milliseconds. Monitoring tools, starting from typical default ping utility (the one that sends ICMP Echo packets and waits for response), are consistent in their results if typical response is above 10-15 milliseconds. When response time drops significantly and is circa 1ms or even less, the results may begin to vary considerably.

Use proxy to process complex or aggregated data

Imagine you need a monitor to react to a derivative of several performance values. For example, you could need to only trigger alert if CPU load and free memory have both crossed certain thresholds. If those monitors are related to the same host, you can always use generic monitor type, such as Script or Program, Python script etc. and do whatever math is required. What should you do if the performance values can only be taken from different hosts? There are several solutions.

Use Windows Subsystem for Linux to enhance IPHost monitoring setups

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a software component allowing to run Linux applications directly on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 starting from August 2016. There are several software projects aimed at running/porting certain GNU/Linux applications to Windows, most known being Cygwin and Minfw-w64.

Make use of Python bundled with IPHost to create new monitors and alerts

Scripting languages (VBScript, Python, PowerShell etc) are both flexible and convenient to create small scripts, to handle a simple monitoring task (such as poll a device for data or execute custom alert). Python has an advantage of being general purpose cross-platform scripting language for years, with many well-known scripts either already available on the Net, or quick to compose.

Common pitfall of addressing registry entries in 64-bit operating system

Accessing Windows registry (local or remote) is a typical way of gathering useful data. However, there’s a typical pitfall that can cause unexpected scripts or programs behavior. Namely, accessing registry values across different architectures (say, 64-bit entries from 32-bit applications).

Quick start monitoring by using lightweight monitors

There are instructions to get started with IPHost Network Monitor, covering most typical situations. However, using the defaults (for both monitors parameters and for network discovery) when looking for hosts and/or monitors can result in rather slow setup. In most cases, it is simpler to create "draft", lightweight monitors just to make sure the service exists and accepts connections, and add actual protocol-specific checks as required.

How to perform simple testing of critical network assets state

Certain changes in services or devices can often be misheeded; failure to recognize even subtle changes can later result in unpleasant consequences. Below we list several examples of such incidents; the checks described are rather lightweight and can be run frequently for critical network assets. The cases below assume that any change in current device’ state should be treated as security issue.

Maintain monitoring, backups and updates: basics of information security

There are three basic types of activity in information security – those that should be performed periodically to reduce possible risks to minimum. Periodic updates is one of them: as software pieces are being developed and enhanced, it is required to update them for many reasons, one of them being possible vulnerabilities.

Do you use uniform tools to perform monitoring in different environments?

While monitoring different types of OS, it is essential to reduce the number of tools used to a logical and reasonable minimum. Under “tools”, we understand all kinds of APIs, software packages and technologies are used to perform the monitoring tasks. For example, same or similar tasks of monitoring system resources can be solved by using SNMP, WMI, various scripting languages, such as PS1, Python, VBasic and so on.