How to Create Devices and Targets

How it Works

During 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 Target

Hostname / Port

Enter the SMTP server address and port number. This could be the URL or the IP address.

Time Validation Threshold (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.

Secure connection

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.

Login to Server

When disabled –Dotcom-Monitor® connects to the destination address and port and checks for a 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).

DNS Options

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 allows to set up the mapping of IP addresses to hostnames. IPv6 and IPv4 DNS resolution is supported.

To specify the mapping, enter the IP address and the hostname 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 only to 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.

Error Filter

You can set a filter to ignore specific error types and codes. For example, DNS errors could be filtered out based on who is responsible for DNS server operations. You can create filters that will ignore specific errors that you know may occur and are not relevant to the goal of a specific device.

In addition, you can set up the system to ignore a range of error codes using a dash, or multiple error codes using semicolons as a separator.

For example, if on one particular device, you do not care about 404 errors, you can filter them out so that you do not receive alerts when they are detected.

Note that if an error matches the filter conditions, the error will not be reflected on the reports and can’t be tracked down.