Active Checks
Introduction
Shinken Enterprise is able to monitor hosts and checks in two different ways: actively and passively. Using Active checks is the most common method for monitoring hosts and checks. The main features of actives checks are the following:
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On-demand checks are performed whenever Shinken Enterprise sees a need to obtain the latest status information about a particular host or check. For example, when Shinken Enterprise is determining the reachability of a host, it will often perform on-demand checks of parent and child hosts to accurately determine the status of a particular network segment.
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In most cases you'll use Shinken Enterprise to monitor your hosts and checks using regularly scheduled :ref:`active checks <thebasics/activechecks>`. Active checks can be used to "poll" a device or check for status information every so as often as needed. Shinken Enterprise also supports a way to monitor hosts and checks passively instead of actively. They key features of passive checks are the following:
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Passive checks are useful for monitoring checks that are:
- Asynchronous in by nature, they cannot or would not be monitored effectively by polling their status on a regularly scheduled basis
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External applications can submit passive host check results to Shinken Enterprise by writing a PROCESS_HOST_CHECK_RESULT external command to the external command file.
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