We proudly announce the release of a completely new Host and Contact Management system which will provide better organization and monitoring of your computers. The system features grouping of several hosts, unlimited notification contact creation, as well as multiple communication method assignment to each of the contacts.

Host Grouping

All the hosts are now organized in groups. To start using the system, users first need to create a Host Group. This group can be given any name in order to help organize the hosts. There are two types of groups that can be created: Local and Global. The Global group is equivalent to what we used to have before: its hosts will be monitored by pings generated by our Ping Server. This means that only hosts whose ports are open to the internet can be monitored in the Global group. The Local group is a brand new feature of PingTool.net. Hosts of the Local groups are monitored by a separate tool that needs to be installed on one of the computers on the network where local hosts are to be monitored. This feature allows local systems to be monitored for connectivity problems without exposing them to the global network.
Once the group is created, hosts can be added to it up to the user account limit. The monitoring starts as soon as the first host is added. The only thing left to decide is who will get notified when one of the hosts from this group becomes unreachable. To do that it is first necessary to create Notification Contacts, which then can be easily assigned to one or more Groups.

New Notification Contacts

Users are no longer limited to 5 contacts per account. Unlimited number of contacts can be created and then assigned to Host groups in order to receive notification when hosts from those groups go offline. Contacts can be given a name which will be included in notification emails. Repeated notifications can also be requested which will cause our system to keep sending notifications until all the hosts go back online or until the repeat limit is reached.

Multiple Communication Methods

Each of the contact can be assigned one or more communication method. These methods are used to deliver the notifications about the host connectivity problems. Contacts are no longer limited to 1 email, 1 sms, and 1 voice communication method. Each contact can be assigned multiple methods of the same type with no limitations. This means that you can receive the notifications faster by sending them to multiple places at the same time.

We hope that you will find these improvements helpful in managing your account. As always we are open to suggestions so feel free to contact us either through the forum or email.

- Edited by Katrina Valuyeva