Opengear's Lighthouse VM, Lighthouse Standard and Lighthouse Enterprise appliances (and the earlier VCMS / CMS6100) ensure always-available wired and wireless secure connectivity to the Opengear console servers and connected devices distributed at remote sites. In general Lighthouse will be used in conjunction with the enterprise customer's existing centralized management system.
However for convenience the centralized management software (CMS) in Opengear's connectivity solutions also includes a Nagios (www.nagios.org) monitoring system to provide light weight monitoring.
The Monitor: Tactical Overview gives you an overview of the current status of the monitored services and hosts (i.e. all the Managed Console Servers and their Managed Devices). Many of the displays have a Connect, Manage Power, View Status or View Logs button in the Status Information field, which will enable automatic connection to the relevant screen on that Managed Device or Managed Console Server using SDT Connector.
The Monitor: Problems screens show the current problems with the hosts and services being monitored. The browser refreshes every 30 seconds so you get the current list of failed services. Also CMS checks the hosts and services at regular (programmable) intervals. So if an error was reported, but on the next check reports that everything is okay for that service, the status will be updated.
The Nagios checks undertaken in the CMS and the Nagios presentation layer can be customized. Also select NRPE and NSCA checks can be off loaded to be performed on the Managed Console Server devices, which can significantly reduce network traffic. However these changes require edits to the embedded Nagios server config files (refer User Manual).
Notification Elevation
The Auto-response feature in alll Opengear console servers can be configured to send email/ SMS/SNMP notifications and to take a sequence of follow-on actions in event of an alert trigger event. This ideal for local on-site problem remediation. However the Nagios features in CMS allow more sophisticated notification and elevation.
With Nagios, host and service notifications occur when a hard state change occurs, or when a host or service remains in a hard non-OK state and the time specified (by the option in the host or service definition) has passed since the last notification was sent out. 
Each host and service definition has a "contact_groups" option that specifies what contact groups receive notifications for that particular host or service. Contact groups can contain one or more individual contacts. When Nagios sends out a host or service notification, it will notify each contact that is a member of any contact groups specified in the option of the service definition. Nagios realizes that a contact may be a member of more than one contact group, so it removes duplicate contact notifications before it does anything.
Just because there is a need to send out a host or service notification doesn't mean that any contacts are going to get notified. There are several filters that potential notifications must pass before they are deemed worthy enough to be sent out. Even then, specific contacts may not be notified if their notification filters do not allow for the notification to be sent to them. For example if the host or service is in a period of scheduled downtime. If it is in a scheduled downtime, no one gets notified.
The Nagios software can be configured to notify you of problems and recoveries pretty much anyway you want: pager, cell phone, email, instant message, audio alert, electric shocker, etc. How notifications are sent depend on the notification commands that are defined in your object definition files ( /etc/config/scripts/cms-notify-service and /etc/config/scripts/cms-notify-host). For more details refer http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/notifications.html
The Nagios software in CMS also supports optional escalation of contact notifications. This is accomplished by defining host escalations and service escalations in your object configuration file(s). For more details refer http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/escalations.html
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