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Network Monitoring "Hooks"
Why should I monitor my network? Uptime reduces customer complaints. If you know something is down soon after it fails, you will have a chance to fix it before many of your customers even notice it is down, thus reducing the amount of calls recieved. Monitoring of services reduces support time. When services rely on "parent" services, it can be hard to determine the cause of a "child" failure when the root cause has nothing to do with the "child" but actually caused by a failure of the "parent". Time is often wasted trying to diagnose problems with one service when the root cause is the failure of another service.
How do I monitor my network? There are several network monitoring tools available, each work on the same principles. The network monitoring tool connects to various services on different machines at timed intervals, if a connection is unavailable then the service is considered "down" and some form of notification is given to alert system administrators of the outage.
What are "hooks"? Hooks are the services provided that allow a network monitor to connect and check availability. Many networkable applications provide the hook as the application itself. An example of an application that provides its own hook would be a web server, exposing port 80 for clients to connect to also exposes port 80 for the network monitor to connect to.
How do I monitor something that doesn't provide a hook? A secondary application must be used that monitors the item in question and then reflects the status of the monitored item in a hook provided. An example of this would be the use of AppMon to launch an application, monitor the status of the application and report it as down should the application fail or be closed. Another hook would be using SpaceMon to monitor network storage space.
*Suggested network monitoring tools include: What's Up Gold & Servers Alive