ServerView and WebView monitoring devices can represent a collection of several monitoring targets (targets of internet infrastructure or web services monitoring) to be performed in sequence on a set schedule.

All monitoring targets within a device are included in the alerting and reporting communications, so that if any single target within a device experience errors, the alerts and reports will reflect those errors. Therefore, if one target in a device is reporting an error while another target in that device is reporting success, the device will be considered down unless you have applied a filter on the device to ignore the specific errors being reported.

All targets inherit the monitoring settings from the device under which they were created.

If you have multiple targets and you wish to receive separate alerts or reports for each target, then you must set them up under individual devices. This will ensure that each target runs independently and does not have to wait for a previous target to complete before it starts. This will also ensure that alerts are triggered in a timely manner. If there are multiple targets in a device, the system runs all targets before an alert will be triggered.

See the  Limitations on Multi-Target Devices article of our wiki.

When to Set Up Multiple Targets Within a Device

Monitoring targets grouped by the device are meant to be directly related targets, such as individual page loads in a web transaction sequence. In essence, a multi-target device allows you to execute a flow that contains several requests, with each subsequent request using the data extracted from the responses to the previous one. A good example here would be the monitoring of Web API that requires authentication. In this case, you need to send two consecutive HTTP requests to the API. The first one will request an authentication token from the API. And the second one will use the token retrieved from the response to the first call to push payload to the target API.

Monitoring of “server farm” or “server pool” load balancing is another reason to set up a multi-target device. Upon configuring redundancy group monitoring, you may want to be alerted only when the threshold of redundancy fails. In this case, you can set it up under a single device. Leverage the Error detected in more than (X) tasks filter to set up the alert threshold.

  • Example. Website Transaction Monitoring

How to Create and Manage a Multi-Target Device

If you need to add another target to an HTTP(S) or Rest Web API device, create a new device, and from within the device edit screen, click the plus button on the left target configuration sidebar.

Otherwise, to create a multi-target device, use the following steps:

  1. Create a new device, set up the first target settings, and save the device.
  2. Once on the Device Manager page, navigate to the device menu , and select Add Target.

When a multi-target device has been created, you can add the next target from within the Edit Monitoring Device interface.

If you need to modify several targets within a device, it’s recommended to clone the device and then make the necessary changes.