ConnectWise Automate 11 monitoring 101: remote monitors

You wouldn’t want a client’s server to go down and you not know about it. That downtime is killing their profit and could also potentially kill your relationship with their business. Remote monitoring prevents that nightmare from happening.

Remote monitoring

Whereas the internal monitor keeps tabs on system processes, a remote monitor is running and watching directly on the agent. Keep in mind that the computer needs to be online when you're trying to install a remote monitor so it can actually take that monitor and load it on the remote agent.

Usage

You can use remote monitors to watch for actions across the network like pings, TCP/IP, and even void monitoring for SNMP. They’re especially useful for time-sensitive and critical issues.

In ConnectWise Automate® 11, formerly LabTech, you can choose how often you want your remote monitor to run. By default, it’s set to 5 minutes. If it's something critical, like web services, you can set it for one minute. You can even set it for thirty seconds.

More remote monitor info

Alerting

Alerts in remote monitoring are a bit different than internal. With internal, it tells you when it detects something wrong. With remote monitoring, you tell it how many times you’ll accept a failed state before it alerts you. Think of it like this: you do a ping check and it fails. Emergency? Probably not, but let’s check again.

With internal, it will tell you every time that ping check failed. With remote, you can set it to “X” amount of failed pings in a row before alerting you, saving you time and eliminating the hassle of having to sort through several emails before you find one with critical information.

We recommend that you adjust this setting to suit your particular needs. But one thing you don’t want to do, either with internal or remote monitors, is change the Alert Message Subject Success/Failure feature. If you do, you have a higher chance of breaking something pretty important.

Another thing we recommend is to always take your remote monitor, make it an individual agent, and then do some testing. Make sure you feel comfortable with it and that you’re able to get the results you're looking for.

These tips barely scratch the surface of ConnectWise Automate 11’s capabilities. To really see what it can do, and what the benefits of business automation can achieve for TSPs of any size, check out our free automation eBook.