AlertSite Quick Start Guide

Introduction

This Quick Reference Guide gives the Trial user a short “Site Tour” of the AlertSite console, including features and configuration tips. Note that the illustrations shown below are examples for display purposes only.

Dashboard

After you have logged in to the console, you're presented with the Dashboard, which gives you a bird's-eye view of your monitored devices, including availability, status, response time, and error status in the last 24 hours. Check the boxes next to your devices in the Device Grid to display response time graphs for those devices, as shown below. There are tabs for any configured Security Scan and ServerAgent devices, Notifications, important Messages, and Preference settings:

The red Control Menu provides access to any section of the console. Each menu link that displays a drop-down list on mouse-over will display the first item in the drop-down when you click on the menu link, with the exception of the Support link, which displays the Support Center. If you need help at any time, you can click the Help button on the right side of the Control Menu.

The rest of this document leads you through some configuration options and other considerations, starting with account information (right-most menu dropdown) and then proceeding with typical console navigation.

Accounts

After logging in, verify the Account information. Click on Account in the Control Menu to bring up the Manage Account page:

Select the correct timezone and adjust for Daylight Savings Time if appropriate to your region, and fill in the address information for both the Administrative Contact and Billing Contact. Click Submit Changes in the upper right to save these modifications. All contact information must be completed in order to save changes to this screen.

Status

The Status: All Devices page displays an overview of the devices you selected to monitor when you signed up for your trial. Click on Status in the Control Menu to select the default All Devices:

This page displays the devices in your account. You can see the monitoring interval, monitoring state, error status and response time measurements. Hovering over the box with the status number in the Last Status column displays a short description of the status code; for a more in-depth description of each code, click the Help button in the red banner and select AlertSite Status Codes from the Help index.

Configuration

To add, delete, or configure devices, click on the Configuration link in the Control Menu. This brings up the Configuration: Sites screen showing the site that you referenced when you started the trial:

Click on the Site Name (alertsite.com, in the example above) to bring up the Manage Site screen. The field labeled Monitoring is is Disabled by default. Click in the box and select Enabled from the drop-down list, then click the Submit button in the upper right:

NOTE: Always click the Submit button in the upper right before navigating off the page in order to preserve your changes.

Locations

Our Performance plans allow monitoring from 3 locations around the globe, or, for monitoring types that allow rotation, rotating up to 3 at a time from any of our world-wide monitoring stations. To select additional monitoring locations, click the Locations button (in the upper right) to see the Locations table. In the illustration below, 6 locations were selected with Dallas as the Primary location (used for notification purposes, depending on monitoring type):

You may select and deselect locations according to your monitoring needs, and choose a Primary monitoring location, typically the location closest to your facility. Click the Submit button to update the list of locations for this device. To return to the device, click the device name in red located above the table on the left.

Notifiers

The email address you signed up with is automatically added as the notifier to receive alerts in the event of an error. You can configure the number of notifications sent to this notifier and add additional notifiers from the Notifiers screen. Besides email, notification methods include text to wireless device, VoIP phone call, and pagers.

Click on the Notifiers button to see the list of notifiers. Click on the link E-mail (text format) in the Notification Method column to bring up the configuration screen, for example:

For more information about each field in this form, click on the link in the Help section at the bottom or the in the right side of the red banner at the top.

Diagnostics

The Site Diagnostics page, accessed from the Support drop-down, does an immediate check on the selected site. The different tests have different delivery methods, and which tests you can select depends on the Site Plan associated with the device:

For this example, we selected the Test Type Fullpage Test and clicked Submit. The results are displayed in the browser:

Reports

The Performance Reports facility is a powerful tool for scheduling reports and creating ad hoc reports. Click on Reports in the Control Menu to display the Performance Reports configuration screen:

When signing up for a trial, a daily Scheduled Summary report is configured to be sent to the email address you signed up with. This contains the previous day's statistics. You can change the distribution list by:

• selecting Scheduled Reports from the Reports drop-down, or by clicking on the Scheduled Reports button in the Performance Reports screen
• selecting the report you want to change by clicking on the name in the Site/Device column, and
• modifying the fields in the Report Scheduler dialog that pops up.

You can also view reports in the Document Manager. To get to the Document Manager, select it from the Reports drop-down or click the Document Manager button in the Performance Reports screen.

To create an ad hoc report, in the Performance Reports screen:

• select the Site/Device
• choose the type of report
• click the appropriate boxes to select the objects to include in the report
• select the locations
• set the date range
• click the Create Report button

Customer Support

For customer service or billing inquiries, go to AlertSite Support.

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