How to create devices and tasks
During an SMTP monitoring, the agents monitor the SMTP server by connecting to the specified mail server and performing an SMTP handshake. If a remote server does not respond to a handshake or is unavailable, an error condition will be triggered. If you have alerts configured, you will receive an alert.
Creating a task
Once you have created a device and are adding or editing an SMTP task, you will be prompted to adjust the following settings.
Enter the SMTP server address and port number. This could be the URL or the IP address.
Completion Timeout (in seconds)
Enter the number of seconds the task should wait for a response from the web page before ending the task and returning an error. If this is left blank the default timeout for a task is 120 seconds.
When enabled – SMTP over SSL/TLS will be requested.
If you select SSL, please make sure there is the correct port number in the Hostname / Port fields.
When disabled –Dotcom-Monitor® connects to the destination address and port and check for successful connection.
When enabled – the authentication procedure will perform the following steps using the credentials supplied in the Login Information section:
User Name: Enter a username for SMTP authentication
Password: Enter a password for SMTP authentication
The authentication will be attempted using the following methods:
- CRAM_MD5
- Login
- Plain
- Simple
- SSL/TLS
If none of the methods have succeeded unencrypted, the socket is switched to SSL and repeats each method until a positive response is received (according to RFC 5034 on authentication mechanisms).
The DNS Options feature allows users to choose how domain name server (DNS) requests are conducted during a monitoring task.
To specify the mode of resolving hostnames, in the DNS Resolve Mode section, select one of the available modes. For more details on the feature configuration, see DNS Mode Options.
The Custom DNS Hosts section contains the mappings of IP addresses to hostnames.
To specify the mapping, enter the IP address and the host name in the corresponding fields.
Examples:
192.168.107.246 example.com user.example.com userauth.example.com tools.example.com
192.168.107.246 example.com
192.168.107.246 user.example.com
192.168.107.246 userauth.example.com
See also: DNS Mode Options.
SMTP servers are allowed to only accept connections from a specific list of hosts. So, in order to proceed with monitoring without obstacles, Dotcom-Monitor monitoring agents should be white-listed in a firewall.