Getting started
The main window
The toolbar adds hosts, switches between the table, tiles and route trace, shows or hides the charts and opens Settings. Below the views runs the status line:
- Monitoring, Paused when every host is paused, or Idle with no hosts at all.
- How many hosts are Online, Degraded, Offline and Paused. Click a count to show only those hosts in the table and tiles; click it again to show them all.
- On the right, what alerting is doing: Alerts off, Alerts on, Last alert with its time, or Alerts held until a time while the cooldown runs. Click it to open the alert settings.
View → Legend explains the status dots, the quality bars and the 24-hour bar, with the thresholds currently in force.
Adding hosts
Click Add, enter an IP address or a hostname, optionally a display name and tags, and click Add again. Monitoring starts at once.
Probes attaches TCP or HTTP/S checks to the host, for when the service matters more than the machine: a web server can answer pings while returning errors. A host whose probe fails turns amber, never red, and the alerts can report it.
File → Add Sample Hosts adds well-known hosts around the world, the quickest way to see the application at work.
Importing a list
File → Import Hosts reads a text or CSV file, one host per line. Lines can carry up to three columns, separated by commas, tabs or semicolons: the address, a display name, and tags separated by |. Tags that do not exist yet are created.
Address,Name,Tags 192.0.2.1,Office router,office "[2001:db8::2]:443","Web server, primary",cloud|critical https://www.example.com/status
URLs, ports and ping or traceroute command lines are reduced to the address. A header row is skipped, and hosts already in the list are not added twice.
Working with hosts
Drag hosts in the table to reorder them; Ctrl or Shift+click selects several to pause, resume, tag or remove together. Right-click a host to edit, duplicate, tag, trace or remove it, or to Pause Monitoring: a paused host stays in the list but is not pinged, which suits a machine down for maintenance.
Moving to another computer
File → Export Configuration saves everything (hosts, tags, settings and history) to a single file; Import Configuration on the other computer replaces its configuration with that file.
Add your router, your NAS and your favourite game server, give each a friendly name, and switch to tile view. Leave Ping Monitor minimised: the taskbar widget shows everything is green, and the alerts speak up if it is not.
Choosing a region for a game or VPN endpoint? Add the sample hosts and sort the table by latency. Within a minute you can see which regions answer fastest from where you are, and the sparklines show how steady each one is.