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Alert Events - Tray Icon Change

This is a great event to add to most of your alerts. It's helpful to be able to see if there's an alert condition under way, and a quick glance at the tray can let you know by using this event.

The Tray Icon Change event can do one (or both) of the following:

Change default icon to red during alert conditions:
If you already have PingPlotter showing in the tray, this will change the existing green icon and add red to indicate that an alert has fired. If you don't have PingPlotter in the tray already, then a red icon will be added to the tray. When the alert condition(s) are over, the icon will change back to green.

Popup message in tray:
This shows a "balloon" message coming out of the tray (see image to the left). Not all versions of Windows support this message (some versions of Windows 95 in particular), in which case no balloon will show. Only one balloon can be shown at a time, so the newest balloon always wins (a new balloon message will replace an older one). Notice that by default the balloon will show you the host the alert fired on.

The following commands can be used in your message text (below in blue):

$host The monitored host – i.e.: the target that failed.
$year Current 4 digit year (i.e.: 2003)
$month Current 2 digit month (i.e.: 03)
$day Current 2 digit day (i.e.: 08)
$date Date, 4-2-2 format (i.e.: 2003-03-08) for March 8th.
$hour 24 hour format, (i.e.: 06)
$minute 2 digit minute, (i.e.: 02)

Again, by default PingPlotter has the text Alert on $host, $date $hour:$minute as the text for the popup "balloon". This is a great message because it stays up until you acknowledge it. When you come back to the computer you're using to run PingPlotter, you can see what alert fired, what host it happened on, and what time it *last* happened. This may be over a weekend, but the message will still be there telling you that an alert happened.