How Device Monitoring Works

What Monitoring does

Monitoring gives you continuous visibility into all your managed devices: CPU, memory, disk usage, network status, patch levels, SSL certificate expiry, and more. When something goes outside defined thresholds, it fires an Alert — which can automatically create a support ticket, notify your team, or trigger a remediation action.

How devices get into the system

There are two ways a device appears in Monitoring:

1. Via the Plenix Agent (RMM) Install the lightweight Plenix Windows Agent on a managed device. Once online, the device registers itself, sends regular health telemetry, and becomes available for remote management. This is the recommended path — it enables full monitoring AND remote script execution, patch management, and RDP sessions.

2. Agentless (manual registration) You can manually add a device (server, router, printer) with its IP address and configure basic ICMP/SNMP monitoring without installing an agent. Agentless devices have limited monitoring depth and cannot be remotely managed.

What gets monitored

Metric	Available on
CPU usage	Agent-based
Memory usage	Agent-based
Disk space (per drive)	Agent-based
Running/stopped services	Agent-based
Event log errors	Agent-based
Patch status	Agent-based
Software inventory	Agent-based
Network ping / response time	Both
SSL certificate expiry	Both (by URL)
Printer toner levels	Via Printer Gateway agent

Alerts

An alert fires when a metric crosses a threshold you define:

• CPU > 90% for > 5 minutes
• Disk space < 10% free
• SSL certificate expiring in < 30 days
• Device offline for > 5 minutes

Thresholds are configured per device or via Monitoring Templates which apply a set of alert rules to groups of devices at once. If you manage 50 client servers with the same standards, create one template and assign it to all of them.

Alert → Ticket → Resolution

The most important workflow in Monitoring is the automatic escalation path:

1. Alert fires — e.g. disk usage on a server hits 95%.
2. Automation rule (if configured) creates a Service Desk ticket automatically, pre-filled with the device name, metric value, and alert details.
3. AI Triage (Enterprise) classifies the ticket and runs the Disk Usage diagnostic playbook on the device automatically.
4. The agent opens the ticket, sees the diagnostic output (top 10 largest folders), and can clear temp files via RMM without leaving the ticket.
5. Ticket is resolved; the alert clears when the metric returns to normal.

Without automation rules, alerts sit in Monitoring → Alerts for manual review. With them, nothing is missed.

Network Maps

Monitoring → Network Maps gives you a visual topology of your network. Devices are drawn as nodes with their connection relationships. You can see at a glance which devices are online/offline and how they connect.

Network maps are also used by the Knowledge Graph internally — when an alert fires, the platform can assess the blast radius (which other devices or services depend on the affected device) to prioritise response.

SSL Certificate Monitoring

Add the public URL of any web service to Monitoring → SSL Certificates. Plenix checks the certificate daily and fires an alert (and optionally creates a ticket) when expiry is approaching.

Patch Management

Monitoring → Patch Status gives an overview of Windows Update status across all agent-based devices. You can see which devices are missing updates, force a Windows Update check remotely, and track patch compliance across your estate. Full patch deployment and scheduling is managed in RMM → Patch Management.

How Monitoring connects to the rest of the platform

Service Desk: Alerts create tickets. Tickets display the linked device's current health metrics in the sidebar.

RMM: Monitoring shows you what is wrong; RMM lets you fix it remotely — same device, different capabilities.

CRM: Devices can be assigned to a CRM company so you know which client each device belongs to.

Automation: Alert events trigger automation rules — the "Alert fired" trigger is one of the most commonly used across the platform.

AI Autonomy: When AI Triage classifies a ticket, it looks up the linked device and runs diagnostic playbooks through the Monitoring/RMM stack.

Billing: Device counts can feed into recurring billing calculations if you charge per managed device.

Where to go next

• Add a Device
• Set Up Alert Thresholds
• How RMM Works
• How Automation Works