Radius Monitor

The SiteScope Radius Monitor checks that a RADIUS server is working correctly by sending an authentication request and checking the result. The word RADIUS is an acronym for Remote Authentication Dial In User Service and a RADIUS server is used to authenticate users, often connecting through a remote connection such as a dialup modem or a DSL line.

Each time the Radius Monitor runs, it returns a status message and writes it in the monitoring log file. It also writes the total time it takes to receive a authentication response.

Usage Guidelines

The Radius Monitor is useful for testing that the RADIUS server is correctly handling authentication requests. If the RADIUS server fails, any users that try to use it will be unable to login and access any services. Setup a Radius monitor for each RADIUS server in your environment. You may want to setup multiple monitors per server if you want to test different kinds of login accounts.

In order for SiteScope to monitor your Radius server you must first add the IP address of your SiteScope server to the list of Clients that the Radius server is allowed to communicate with. This must be done in order for the Radius Server to take requests from SiteScope. Failure to do this will result in "Unknown Client" errors on the Radius Server.

The Radius Monitor currently supports Password Authentication Procedure (PAP) authentication but not the Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) or Microsoft Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (MS-CHAP) . Your RADIUS servers must be configured to accept PAP requests in order to use this monitor.

Status

The reading is the current value of the monitor. The possible values for the Radius Monitor are:

OK
unknown host name
timed out reading
match error

The status is logged as either good or error. An error status is returned if the current value of the monitor is anything other than OK.

Completing the Radius Monitor Form

To display the Radius Monitor Form, either click the Edit link for an existing Radius Monitor listed in a monitor table, or click the add a Monitor link on a group's detail page and click the Add Radius Monitor link.

Complete the items on the Radius Monitor form as follows. When the required items are complete, click the Add Monitor button.

RADIUS Server: Enter the IP address or the name of the RADIUS server that you want to monitor. For example, you could enter either 206.168.191.21 or radius.thiscompany.com.
Secret: Enter the secret used to encrypt all requests to this RADIUS server
Username: Enter the username to authenticate
Password: Enter the password to authenticate
Update every: Select how often the monitor should try to reach the host. The default interval is to run or update the monitor once every 10 minutes. Use the drop-down list to the right of the text box to specify another update interval in increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The update interval must be 15 seconds or longer.
Title: Enter a title text for this monitor. This text is displayed in the group detail page, in report titles, and other places in the SiteScope interface. If you do not enter a title text, SiteScope will create a title based on the host, server, or URL being monitored.

Advanced Options

The Advanced Options section presents a number of ways to customize monitor behavior and display. Use this section to customize error and warning thresholds, disable the monitor, set monitor-to-monitor dependencies, customize display options, and enter other monitor specific settings required for special infrastructure environments. The options for this monitor type are described below. Complete the entries as needed and click the Add or Update button to save the settings.

Disable

Check this box to temporarily disable this monitor and any associated alerts. To enable the monitor again, clear the box.

Timeout

The number of seconds that the Radius monitor should wait for the connection to the port, and for any sending and receiving to complete. Once this time period passes, the Radius monitor will log an error and report an error status.

Port Number

Choose the TCP port used by the RADIUS server. The default port used by RADIUS servers is 1645 and does not usually need to be changed

Match Content

Enter a string of text to check for in the response. If the text is not contained in the response, the monitor will display "no match on content". The search is case sensitive. You may also perform a Perl regular expression match by enclosing the string in forward slashes, with an "i" after the trailing slash indicating case-insensitive matching. (for example, "/ \d\d/" or "/size \d\d/i").

Verify Error

Check this box if you want SiteScope to automatically run this monitor again if it detects an error. When an error is detected, the monitor will immediately be scheduled to run again once.

Note: In order to change the run frequency of this monitor when an error is detected, use the Update every (on errors) option below.

Note: The status returned by the Verify Error run of the monitor will replace the status of the originally scheduled run that detected an error. This may cause the loss of important performance data if the data from the verify run is different than the initial error status.

Warning: Use of this option across many monitor instances may result in significant monitoring delays in the case that multiple monitors are rescheduled to verify errors at the same time.

Update Every (on error)

You use this option to set a new monitoring interval for monitors that have registered an error condition. For example, you may want SiteScope to monitor this item every 10 minutes normally, but as often as every 2 minutes if an error has been detected. Note that this increased scheduling will also affect the number of alerts generated by this monitor.

Schedule

By default, SiteScope monitors are enabled every day of the week. You may, however, schedule your monitors to run only on certain days or on a fixed schedule. Click the Edit schedule link to create or edit a monitor schedule. For more information about working with monitor schedules, see the section on Schedule Preferences for Monitoring.

Monitor Description

Enter additional information about this monitor. The Monitor Description can include HTML tags such as the <BR> <HR>, and <B> tags to control display format and style. The description will appear on the Monitor Detail page.

Report Description

Enter an optional description for this monitor that will make it easier to understand what the monitor does. For example, network traffic or main server response time. This description will be displayed on with each bar chart and graph in Management Reports and appended to the tool-tip displayed when you pass the mouse cursor over the status icon for this monitor on the monitor detail page.

Depends On

To make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor or monitor group, use the drop-down list to select the monitor on which this monitor is dependent. Select None to remove any dependency.

Depends Condition

If you choose to make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor, select the status condition that the other monitor or monitor group should have in order for the current monitor to run normally. The current monitor will be run normally as long as the monitor on which it depends reports the condition selected in this option.

List Order

By default, new monitors are listed last on the Monitor Detail page. You may use this drop-down list to choose a different placement for this monitor.

Error if

You use this option to customize the conditions under which the Radius Monitor generates an error status message.

You can change this to generate an error based on the length of the round trip times. Enter a comparison value and use the comparison operator list to specify an error threshold such as: >= (greater than or equal to), != (not equal to), or < (less than).

Warning if

You use this option to customize the conditions under which the Radius Monitor generates a warning status message. By default, the Radius monitor does not have a warning threshold, but you can set this option to define one.

Enter a comparison value and use the comparison operator list to specify an error threshold such as: >= (greater than or equal to), != (not equal to), or < (less than).

Good if

SiteScope maintains a good status if the reading returned is 200, but you can change this to be based upon round-trip time.