Here are some basic i-Vertix monitoring concepts:

• A host is any device with an IP address that you want to monitor. For example, a physical server, a virtual machine, a temperature sensor, an IP camera, a printer, or a disk space.
• A service is a checkpoint or indicator that you want to monitor on a host. This can be CPU utilization, temperature, motion detection, bandwidth utilization, disk I/O, and so on.
• To collect each indicator value, monitoring plug-ins are used, which are periodically executed by a collection engine called Centreon Engine.
• In order to be executed, a plugin needs a set of arguments that define, for example, which host to connect to or through which protocol. The plugin and its arguments form a command.

For example, to monitor a host with i-Vertix, configure all the commands needed to measure the desired indicators, and then deploy that configuration to the collection engine so that those commands are run periodically.

Once hosts and services are monitored, they have a status in i-Vertix (e.g. OK, Warning, Critical...). You can keep track of any changes using the Resources Status page.

If a problem occurs (not-OK/not-UP status), contacts can receive notifications, within set time periods.

In i-Vertix, monitoring is facilitated by the following elements:

• Host templates and service templates, which allow you to define defaults to speed up the creation of these objects.

• Plugin Packs, which provide out-of-the-box host and service templates. These greatly simplify the configuration of hosts and services: for example, you only need to apply Plugin Pack templates to a host in order to monitor it.

• The Host and service auto-discovery, which allows you to obtain a list of new hosts and services and automatically add them to the list of monitored resources.