Enter a description for the event monitor or use the one that was provided automatically. The description you enter will be the name that event monitor goes by in the user interface and in all notifications.

It's a good idea to make the description long enough that you can easily recognize the event monitor and its role but not so long that it takes up a lot of space in your notifications.

Good examples include "Check Drive Space on Servers" or "Router Bandwidth Checks".

Tags lets you assign attributes to your event monitors. For example, you may want to add the tag "SNMP" to all of your router event monitors so that you can identify them as using the SNMP protocol.

Tags can also be used to identify the role of an event monitor. For example, if you have event monitors for multiple departments in your organization you can add tags to the event monitor indicating this.

There are two types of tags: Plain tags and valued tags.

Plain tags are just a list of tags separated by commas. For example, "sales dept, drive space checks, daily at midnight".

Valued tags, as the name suggestions, allow you to assign values to the tags which can later be used in your notifications. For example, "dept=techsupport, importance=critical; contact=jsmith; phone: 555-1212". By customizing our templates you can include valued tags in your e-mail notifications.

By default all event monitors collect data when they run and that data is used to populate graphs and trend data. Depending on your monitoring schedules, with just a few megabytes of data you can collect years of data so it is usually a good idea to leave this option on but you can selectively turn off this option to save some space.