Glossary
Some common terms used in this documentation

Starfish Monitor

Starfish Monitor is a central windows service that monitores your machnes via Starfish Arms.

  • It runs as a Windows Service
  • It stores its data in an Embedded SQL Server database
  • It listenes on port 10222 for Starfish Arms connections
  • It has an embedded HTTP server which presents the Starfish Monitor Web Portal user interface on port 10888.

You can visit https://{your starfish monitor server address}:10222 on the monitored server to check if Starfish Monitor is available from the server you want to monitor.

If everything is OK you should see "Starfish Monitor is active, and accepting incoming messages." message.

Starfish Monitor Web Portal

Starfish Monitor Web Portal is a user interface of Starfish Monitor. It is available on port 10888: http://{your starfish monitor server address}:10888

You can see active alerts, manage users that receive notifications and configure alerts settings there.

Starfish Arm

Starfish Arm is a secure, lightweight Windows Service that Starfish Monitor uses to monitor particular server. It must be installed on all of the machines that you plan to monitor.

Starfish Arms connect to Starfish Monitor and send monitoring data constantly.

You can visit http://localhost:10777 on the monitored server to check if Arm was able to connect to your Starfish Monitor server. If everything is OK you should see "Starfish Arm is connected." message.

Arm

See Starfish Arm

Label

Labels are used for managing alarm configurations and arms.

Each alarm type has a single "Default configuration. Each Arm has at least "Default" label assgined, so if no specific configuration is found default one is used.

You can assigne any number of labels to each arm and non-default configuration. Starfish Monitor prefers specific configuration over default one.

For example: if you want to monitor specific event log on 2 machines, where you application runs, you should:

  • Create event log configuration for this log
  • Mark this configuration with new "My Web App" label,
  • Assign this label to 2 arms/machines on which your application runs.

Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a periodic signal generated by Starfish Arms to indicate normal operation. Heartbeat is sent at a regular interval of few seconds.

If a heartbeat isn't received for some time machine that should have sent the heartbeat is assumed to have failed.