Created on 2005-07-14 by Rainer Gerhards.

An application-specific monitor is one that actually checks a specific application. With AliveMon, you can initiate a TCP connection request to any application using TCP - which are most of the applications. You can also UDP-based applications, as long as you know what to check for. For popular game servers, we already provide canned templates making game server monitoring a one-click-action. For TCP-based applications, we offer specific probes for example for mail and web servers.

The advantage of an application-specific monitor compared to a ping-based one is that you actually know if your application is up and running. With ping, you only check the base system. So with ping it is unnoticed if - for example - your mail or web server goes down. With an application-specific monitor, you will notice this immediately. This is because in this mode AliveMon is acting much like a real client, and so it sees if trouble arises. Another advantage of application-level monitoring is that it also works in firewalled environments where ping has been disabled for security reasons.

For most flexibility, AliveMon allows you to combine ping-based monitoring with any number of application-specific monitors for the same system. During auto-discovery, many application-specific monitors are even automatically added.