Welcome! The following 30 articles teach you about 30 key aspects of IT and server monitoring with FrameFlow. As you proceed through your 30-day free trial, this companion content will help you get familiarized with our product and its extensive capabilities. Feel free to follow chronologically or dive into topics of interest at your leisure. The articles have links for further reading on each subject.
Welcome to FrameFlow! If you've found yourself here, you've likely downloaded our free trial. The following 30 entries are companion content to the free 30 days you received by signing up for our trial. By spending just 15 minutes a day, you'll get a well-rounded view of our product's abilities by the time your trial is complete. Today, we'll go over basic setup and system requirements.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Once you've downloaded FrameFlow successfully, it's time to start exploring the interface. Today, we'll introduce you to FrameFlow's interface and teach you a bit about each section as we go along.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Today, let's add the first network devices to your FrameFlow configuration. We'll show you how to add your first network devices and begin creating an organizational structure for your devices and monitors.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow offers over one hundred specialized event monitors, providing customized alerts about suboptimal conditions in your monitoring environment ASAP. Each of these event monitors has unique settings tailored to their monitoring purposes. Today, we'll go through the steps necessary to install a simple but crucial event monitor: the Ping Event Monitor.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Many network and server monitoring solutions use "agents" to get values from the machines they are monitoring, but not FrameFlow. Instead of using agents, we manage the credentials needed to connect to your network devices using authentication profiles. Authentication profiles are sets of saved credentials that you can use to authenticate between FrameFlow and the systems you're monitoring. Today, we'll go over each type of authentication profile and when to use them.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...In the next few days, we're going to dive into more advanced IT monitoring. First, though, we need to establish security. Up until now, we've been running on a built-in webserver, which is designed to help you set up FrameFlow but doesn't offer the high security needed for monitoring beyond demo purposes. Today, we'll switch to IIS and do a few more things to secure your FrameFlow installation.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Now that we've got login and security details, we can turn our attention to system health monitoring. FrameFlow's System Health Event Monitor watches over five key system health metrics for each connected device: CPU usage, disk space, memory usage, bandwidth, and ping response time. Today's lesson is all about the System Health Event Monitor. Let's dive in!
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow has over 100 specialized event monitors for all types of monitoring. Today, we'll go over the categories of event monitors that we offer and tell you a bit about each one. By the end of today, you'll be more familiar with our roster of event monitors and you'll even have a few set up.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow's Headquarters section is the real-time hub for all your network devices and the first tab on the grey sidebar on the left of the interface. Here, you can see an up-to-date list of any conditions that may require your attention. From there, you can also suppress or resume alerts so you can focus on the most crucial alerts first and handle the rest later. Today, we'll explore the Headquarters section and show what it can do!
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow's Dashboards section has all the tools for you to begin making beautiful and informative diagrams of your monitoring configuration. Mix and match over 25+ dashboard elements that receive and display data from our powerful event monitors. Today's lesson is dedicated to exploring our Dashboards section and all its panels.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow's in-app alerts are the default option in the "Notifications and Actions" section of the settings for your event monitors. With this option selected, you won't receive any external alerts. The results of event monitor runs will be recorded in the event history, but to view any alerts, you'll have to open the app. While this is useful for some event monitor data, for anything that requires immediate alerting, you'll need to create a notification profile. Today's lesson will showcase different methods of alerting with FrameFlow.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...What if you have a system that you need to monitor that falls outside the scope of regular monitoring? Most every organization has complex or niche monitoring requirements, whether it’s a custom in-house system or a legacy system that’s necessary for operations. It’s important to monitor these systems but standardized options probably don’t exist for them. Today's lesson shows you how to use PowerShell and FrameFlow to cover important gaps in your monitoring and create custom monitoring actions.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Event History is a hub for all past monitoring results that you can access using the gray sidebar on the left of FrameFlow's interface. Upon visiting this section, you'll see the list of monitoring events from all network devices and event monitors. You can use information from the Event History to search for error events, track patterns over time, and sort through the thousands of alerts and checks that a large organization tends to rack up in a short amount of time. Let's explore it today in more depth.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...With FrameFlow, you can create custom reports that summarize the daily functions of your various event monitors and network devices. Every FrameFlow installation comes with five default report types: CPU usage, memory, disk usage, ping response time, and bandwidth. Today, we'll explore these and other reports in more depth.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Your network is the backbone of your IT operations, constantly ensuring that your vital systems can communicate with each other. As such, it's critical that you maintain peak health across your network. Fortunately, your new FrameFlow installation includes several event monitors that gather and alert about crucial data from devices on your network. Let's explore them now.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...As various cloud services become more and more relevant, they unfortunately do not always become more reliable. Amazon AWS, Microsoft 365, and other major providers have all had issues with service reliability in the past, some of which can grind your operations to a halt. To combat this problem, we’ve created several cloud-based event monitors to keep you up to speed on what’s going on in your cloud configurations. We monitor Azure, Microsoft 365, and AWS at a high level so you can view and address monitoring problems instantly. Today's lesson is all about cloud service monitoring, so let's dive in.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Anyone using the cloud knows that cloud service related costs can add up quickly. The key is to keep a consistent eye on your spending throughout the month so you can make any necessary adjustments, but this can take considerable time and resources. Luckily, FrameFlow can help you keep track of your cloud-related bills automatically throughout the month with our selection of billing event monitors. Today, we'll explore these event monitors in depth.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...In a monitoring environment with hundreds of network devices, dozens of event monitors, and several IT team members making monitoring changes at all times, it pays to have systems in place that keep track of who does what. FrameFlow has several of these tools built-in to record important actions like logins and administrative changes so you'll always be informed about the actions taken by yourself and other team members.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow's maintenance windows let you define a period of time during which key systems are expected to be down for maintenance. During a maintenance window, monitoring and alerts will be paused for devices assigned to the window. Today, we'll teach you about the different types of maintenance window profiles available to you and let you know how to set them up.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...In the Settings section of each event monitor, there's a section called Dependencies. Dependencies control whether or not an event monitor check will run based on the status of other checks that ran before it. Setting up dependencies as you create your monitoring configuration can help cut back on redundant alerts about conditions that have already been conveyed by your other event monitors. Let's dive in...
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow offers 5 event monitors that are specialized to help monitor your VMware VMs. From VMware host health to snapshot monitoring, FrameFlow has a tool for your VMware monitoring needs. Today, we'll explore each of our VMware event monitors briefly. For more details, visit our reference guides for each VMware event monitor.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Now that we've laid the framework for your network devices and event monitors, it's important that we stop for a moment and address organization. We recommend organizing your network devices and event monitors into groups by category as you go. Good event monitor and network device organization/categorization have more benefits than just ease of use. To learn more, click the button below.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More..."Device Type" is a dropdown option you can find in the Settings section for any network device. Assigning a type to each device helps you keep them organized, but the benefits only begin there. Assigning device types also unlocks additional functionality and information for your network devices. Today's lesson will show you how to specify device types and unlock more information about your network devices.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Today, we'll show you how to configure some advanced security settings so you'll be set up with optimal security should you proceed with FrameFlow after your free trial. This information is available independently of this article and as a PDF in our Technical Resources. Let's dive in.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...FrameFlow has robust support for database monitoring. With our list of dedicated database monitors, you can do much more than just monitoring and alerting. You can also keep up-to-date lists on the size and contents of performance logs, parse for specific lines of text, and run SQL statements straight from your event monitors. To learn more, let's dive in by exploring the SQL Server Event Monitor.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...There's so much important software to monitor in modern IT environments that hardware monitoring can seem like an afterthought sometimes. That's why FrameFlow includes two robust hardware event monitors, the Dell iDRAC Event Monitor and the HP iLO Event Monitor. These event monitors watch every aspect of your Dell or iLO servers and can alert on conditions like overheating. Let's learn some more about them.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...By now, you know that FrameFlow is a versatile tool that monitors virtually any network device and gathers data. You'll have added network devices to your configuration, created event monitors, and received alerts and information about your IT environment. But there's one thing left to monitor: FrameFlow itself. That's what we're tackling today.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...By default, FrameFlow installs in single-site mode, but for organizations with the main headquarters in one place and different secondary locations in another, multi-site mode is needed. FrameFlow's multi-site mode will aggregate data from all of your locations onto a single monitoring interface so you can stay on top of each one no matter where you are. Today, let's learn how to deploy remote nodes and monitor systems at different locations with FrameFlow.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...On Day 27, we showed you how to set up an Installation Health Event Monitor that watches over the system you've installed FrameFlow on and sends alerts about its conditions. But what if your FrameFlow server crashes or fails? Without a backup, all your crucial monitoring will grind to a halt. Today, we'll set up a failover node to ensure that monitoring can always continue smoothly.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
Read More...Congratulations! You've completed FrameFlow's free 30-day trial and hopefully learned a lot along the way. If you have any additional questions or would like to extend your trial, please get in touch and we'll respond to you promptly. To finish this course, let's highlight some resources that help you get to know more about FrameFlow's features and keep updated on the latest FrameFlow news.
Time to Read: 5 Minutes
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