PATROL Agent 9.5 - Part 1: When PATROL agent is unreachable

I got a question recently regarding to the best way to monitor PATROL 9.5 agent health.  In one of my older post "Monitoring PATROL Agent 9.x Status: Do I need AS_AVAILABILITY KM?", I discussed using MC_CELL_HEARTBEAT_FAILURE event instead of AS_AVAILABILITY KM to detect a condition when a PATROL agent is not responding. This still applies to PATROL agent version 9.5.

Similar to AS_AVAILABILITY KM, there are 3 possible causes when a MC_CELL_HEARTBEAT_FAILURE event is received: PATROL server down, PATROL agent down, or network down. 

MC_CELL_HEARTBEAT_FAILURE events are triggered and reported automatically.  You don't need to configure anything as long as you have the following pconfig variables set in each PATROL agent:

"/EventSetup/Configuration/Format" = { REPLACE = "BiiP3" },

"/EventSetup/Configuration/Key" = { REPLACE = "mc" }

"/AgentSetup/integration/integrationServices"={REPLACE="tcp:ISN1:3183,tcp:ISN2:3183"}

and either

"/EventSetup/Configuration/ForwardEventsToIS " = { REPLACE = " Yes " }

or

"/EventSetup/Configuration/EventCells" = { REPLACE = "ISN1/1828,ISN2/1828" }

When PATROL agent is unreachable,  you will receive a MC_CELL_HEARTBEAT_FAILURE event.  When PATROL agent is reachable again, you will receive a MC_CELL_HEARTBEAT_ON event.  You do need to reword the msg event slot to make the message more meaningful.

We will discuss how to detect when PATROL agent hangs in the next post.