How can I make full use of my MxToolbox account? Part 10, Configuring Paid Monitoring

In this installment in our series on making the most of your MxToolbox account we discuss some best practices for configuring your paid monitors and introduce you to Quickwatch monitors.

Configure Paid Monitoring Options

With an MxWatch account you receive access to the MxToolbox Professional toolset and a number of a la carte monitors that you can use for Blacklists (including Domain blacklists), DNS, Mail, HTTP, or other TCP ports.  You can mix and match the types of monitors you use.  With these monitors, you also get an enhanced interface for managing the monitors that includes:

  • Add users to the account – Maybe you have a small team or a colleague with which you work.  Now you can share a single account and access and control your monitors.  The filters_exampleaccount owner can delegate or retain authority to edit or view monitoring information.
  • Use Tags – Have a large number of monitors or maybe monitors for specific groups within your organization?  Tags enable you to logically group monitors without renaming the monitor.
  • Create Custom Filters – Combined with tags, custom filters enable you to group monitors together in your view.
  • Setup Notification Policies – Once you’ve added users and tags, you might want to control how certain monitors alert you and your team.  Notification policies are highly granular ways of controlling how alerts notify you.

A combination of these items gives you everything you need to simplify notification of specific teams or team members in the event of an outage.

Setup Quickwatch Monitors

Have you ever made a change to DNS and then needed to know when it was finished propagating?  Have you ever needed to know when a VM image was finished loading and new services were available?  With our Quickwatch Monitors you can do that and more.  Quickwatch enables you to set a short-term (1 to 3 day) monitor that automatically expires.  During that time if the monitor detects a change, we alert you.  Since the monitor automatically expires, there’s no need for you to login and deactivate or delete the monitor, it stops tracking on its own.  Since Quickwatch Monitors are light and flexible, you get a larger number of them as part of your paid subscription. Use the on anything that is likely to transition quickly and it’ll save you time rerunning queries on the site.

In our next installment we will discuss premium monitoring options to make your job even easier.