Help Introduction What is a Monitor

What is a Monitor?

Any resource whose performance needs to be tracked is considered as a monitor in Site24x7. A monitor can be a website, a server, a network device, an application or any component in your IT infrastructure that needs monitoring. Site24x7 presents these resources as monitors in the web client and examines the availability and various performance trends of your endpoints, internet resources, servers, network resources, cloud resources, VMs, applications and more from a single console. 

For example, a server monitor tracks critical metrics like CPU, memory, disk utilization, network utilization, event logs, and process metrics to avoid any performance degradation issues. Likewise, a website monitor tracks metrics like throughput and response time with detailed first byte time, last byte time, DNS resolution time, and SSL handshake time split-up. 

Site24x7 licensing works based on the type of monitor. Monitors are classified as:

You can view monitors based on Basic and Advanced in the Site24x7 web client. 

Basic Monitors

Website Monitoring (Consumes one Basic monitor)

  • Website (HTTP/HTTPS) monitoring
  • WebSocket monitoring
  • DNS Server, Ping, FTP Server, NTP Server, SMTP Server monitoring
  • SSL/TLS Certificate, Domain Expiry monitoring
  • SOAP Web Service, REST API, REST API Transaction monitoring
  • Port (Custom Protocol), POP Server monitoring
  • Real-time Blocklist Check monitoring
  • Brand Reputation monitoring
  • File Upload monitoring
  • gRPC monitoring

Server Monitoring (Charged based on the number of servers and not individual metrics)

  • Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X Monitoring (agent-based) - consumes two Basic monitors
  • Microsoft IIS Monitoring
  • Microsoft Active Directory
  • Windows Server Backup Monitoring
  • Windows Updates Monitoring
  • Hadoop Monitoring (Each NameNode, DataNode, and YARN will consume one Basic monitor license)
  • Cron and Heartbeat Monitoring
  • Docker Hosts (consumes two Basic monitors) and Containers (five containers will be considered one Basic monitor)
  • Kubernetes Containers and Pods will consume one Basic monitor whereas Kubernetes Nodes will consume 2 Basic monitors (Complete pricing details). 

StatsD Metrics Monitoring

  • Upto 500 metrics without threshold checks can be availed for free. Beyond that, 25 metrics (with or without threshold checks) will be considered as one Basic monitor. 

Plugin Integrations

  • One plugin monitor per server is free. Beyond that, each plugin monitor is considered as one Basic monitor.

Virtualization Monitoring (Agentless, using On-Premise Poller)

  • Each VMware VM Instance
  • VMware ESX/ESXi Host (consumes two Basic monitors) 
  • VMware Datastore
  • VMware Resource Pool
  • VMware Snapshot
  • VMware Cluster (consumes two Basic monitors) 
  • Nutanix Cluster (consumes two Basic monitors) 
  • Nutanix Host (consumes two Basic monitors) 
  • Nutanix VM (consumes two Basic monitors) 

Azure Monitoring

  • Each resource is considered one Basic monitor (Azure VMs will consume two Basic monitors).

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Monitoring

  • Each service/resource is considered one Basic monitor (GCP Compute will consume two Basic monitors).

Amazon Web Services Monitoring

View the different categories of licensing models available for Site24x7's AWS monitoring. 

Cisco Meraki Monitoring

  • Cisco Meraki device (consumes one Basic monitor)
  • Cisco Meraki Organization (consumes one Basic monitor)

Agentless Server Monitoring 

  • Each resource consumes two Basic monitors.

Advanced Monitors

  • Web Transaction (Browser)
  • Web Transaction (Browser) - Selenium WebDriver
  • FTP Transfer
  • Mail Delivery
  • Web Page Speed (Browser)
  • Website Defacement
  • ISP Latency monitoring
  • APM-Insight-Instance
  • Microsoft BizTalk Monitoring
  • Microsoft SharePoint Monitoring
  • Microsoft Office 365 Monitoring
  • Microsoft Active Directory (AD) Monitoring
  • Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Monitoring
  • Microsoft SQL Monitoring
  • Microsoft Failover Cluster Monitoring
  • VMware Horizon
  • Database monitoring
    • MySQL
    • Microsoft SQL (MS SQL)
    • MySQL NDB Clusters
    • PostgreSQL

Some of the key facets of a Site24x7 Monitors are listed below:

You can monitor any internet facing resource using our agentless monitors. Monitoring is enabled from 120+ locations globally or behind the firewall using On-Premises Poller

You can monitor local URLs, ports, processes using the server monitoring agents. In this case, each Server is considered as a monitor. You can also monitor all resources in that server using the same Site24x7 server agent.

We typically charge for a host and IP combination. For example, a server is charged as one Basic monitor, which monitors servers, processes, syslogs, other resources on the server including URL, port, NFS, files, directories and more at no additional cost. Each monitor comes with one plugin on the server. Likewise, for VMware, we charge by virtual machines. 

A server monitor also includes monitoring applications or services using our ready-to-use plugin integrations or your own plugin that you can build. We do not charge you extra for this. Each plugin comes with 25 custom metrics, by default. Also, one plugin is free/server. Additional plugin on server will be accounted as one additional Basic monitor.

Some Microsoft apps supported out-of-the box are charged extra. Microsoft IIS is considered as a Basic monitor. Microsoft Sharepoint, Office 365, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Biztalk, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Failover Cluster, Microsoft AD are licensed as Advanced monitors.

Licensing for network monitoring is purely based on the number of interfaces that are monitored. It is mandatory to have at least one active interface to monitor a device. While ten performance counters per device can be monitored for free, every additional ten is counted as one interface. NetFlow Analyzer also follows an interface-based licensing model. Network Configuration Manager (NCM) follows a device-based licensing model where you can add as many devices as allowed in your license.

Each AWS instance is considered as a monitor.

For internet services monitoring, you can monitor from up to 16 locations. We use a predictable polling from a location logic so that graphs are uniform and intelligible. Other vendors use a round-robin methodology which gives too many spikes between polls because of latency differences due to different geographical conditions. Different sets of 16 locations can be selected from our list of 130 geographical locations to monitor various internet monitors.

The EliteEnterprise and Enterprise Plus Web Plans support monitoring from 16 locations.

The amount of uploadable logs varies with the licensing plan for Site24x7 AppLogs.

Licensing example: Say you have to monitor two physical servers running your website and its back-end. In total, you would need six Basic monitors (each sever monitor consumes two Basic monitors). Two monitors for viewing detailed CPU, memory, disk performance information of your critical servers and one monitor for checking the website's domain itself.

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Help Introduction What is a Monitor