Getting Started

PulseOps Monitor is an on-premise Windows infrastructure monitoring tool. It installs on any Windows machine with SQL Server access and starts monitoring your servers within minutes. All data stays on your own SQL Server — nothing leaves your network.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Windows 10 / 11 / Server 2012 R2 or later
• .NET Framework 4.8 (included with Windows 10 1903+ and Server 2019+)
• SQL Server 2012 or later — any edition including the free SQL Server Express

Steps

1. 1 Download PulseOps_Setup_1.0.0.exe and run it
2. 2 Accept the UAC prompt and follow the installer wizard
3. 3 Launch PulseOps Monitor from the Start Menu or desktop shortcut
4. 4 The Setup Wizard opens automatically on first launch

Setup Wizard

The Setup Wizard runs automatically on first launch and walks you through five steps:

1. Welcome & Licence — optionally activate a licence key (or continue in trial mode)
2. Database — enter your SQL Server connection string. PulseOps creates all tables automatically
3. Email / SMTP — configure your outgoing mail server for alert emails
4. First Server — add your first server to start monitoring immediately
5. Done — PulseOps starts its first monitoring cycle

You can re-run the wizard at any time from Help → Run Setup Wizard.

Adding Servers

Click Add Server in the toolbar or go to Configure → Server Configuration. Enter the server's hostname or IP address and an optional description.

PulseOps uses WMI to connect to servers. The account running PulseOps must have remote WMI access to the target server — typically a domain admin account or a dedicated monitoring service account.

Your First Alert

By default, PulseOps sends an alert when:

• CPU usage exceeds 90% for a sustained period
• Memory usage exceeds 90%
• Disk usage exceeds 85% on any drive
• A monitored Windows service stops
• A server becomes unreachable

All thresholds are configurable per-server in Configure → Server Configuration.

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Global Settings

Open Settings from the toolbar to configure:

• Refresh interval — how often PulseOps polls servers (default: 5 minutes)
• SMTP settings — outgoing email for alerts
• Default alert recipients — email addresses to notify globally
• Teams webhook URL — paste your Teams incoming webhook here
• Slack webhook URL — paste your Slack incoming webhook here
• Alert deduplication — suppress repeat alerts within a configurable window

Per-Server Configuration

Go to Configure → Server Configuration, select a server, and customise:

• CPU, memory and disk alert thresholds
• Per-server email recipients (overrides global)
• Additional drive monitoring (D:, E:, etc.)
• Windows services to monitor on that server
• Auto-restart behaviour for stopped services

Alert Thresholds

Default thresholds:

• CPU: warning at 80%, critical at 90%
• Memory: warning at 85%, critical at 92%
• Disk: warning at 80%, critical at 90%

Set per-server thresholds in Server Configuration to override these for servers you expect to run hot.

Maintenance Windows

Go to Monitoring → Maintenance Windows to define periods during which alerts are suppressed. Useful for patching windows, scheduled reboots or planned outages.

Windows can be one-off (a specific date/time) or recurring (e.g. every Sunday 02:00–04:00).

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Server Monitoring

PulseOps polls each server using WMI every n minutes (configurable). It collects:

• CPU utilisation percentage
• Physical memory usage percentage
• Disk utilisation for C: and any additional configured drives
• Server uptime
• Operating system name and version
• Ping reachability (used for Online/Offline status)

Service Monitoring

Add Windows services to monitor in Configure → Server Configuration → Services tab. PulseOps checks the service status on each poll cycle.

If a service is stopped, PulseOps can optionally auto-restart it before sending an alert. Configure the auto-restart behaviour and rate limiting (e.g. max 3 restarts per hour) per service.

SQL Server Monitoring

Available in the Professional and Enterprise tiers. Go to SQL Monitor in the toolbar to configure SQL Server instances.

PulseOps monitors:

• Database states (online, suspect, offline, restoring)
• Database sizes and growth
• Backup age — alert when a database hasn't been backed up in X days
• Long-running queries (configurable threshold)
• Blocking chains — detects and logs query blocking
• Failed SQL Agent jobs
• Active connection counts
• Page Life Expectancy (memory pressure indicator)

-- The monitoring account needs at minimum:
GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO [monitoring_account]
GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO [monitoring_account]

Advanced Monitoring (SSL, Ports, URLs, Disk Trends)

Go to Monitoring → Advanced Monitoring to configure:

• SSL Certificates — monitor any hostname:port for certificate expiry. Alerts 30 days before expiry
• TCP Ports — check that critical ports (443, 1433, 3389, custom) are open and reachable
• HTTP/HTTPS URLs — verify that websites return the correct status code, with optional content checking
• Disk Trend Analysis — uses daily growth rate to predict when drives will fill up
• Escalation Rules — auto-escalate unacknowledged alerts after a configurable time

Patch Status

Available in Professional and Enterprise. Go to Reports → Patch Status Dashboard. PulseOps queries each server via WMI to retrieve:

• Pending update counts (total, critical, security)
• Date of last installed update
• Whether a reboot is pending

Alerts are raised for servers with critical updates pending, servers not patched in 90+ days, and servers requiring a reboot.

Event Log Monitoring

Available in Enterprise tier. Go to Monitoring → Event Log Monitor to define rules that trigger alerts when specific Event IDs or keywords appear in Windows Event Logs.

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Email Alerts

Configure your SMTP server in Settings → Email. PulseOps sends HTML-formatted alert emails with server name, alert type, current value and timestamp.

Supported SMTP providers: Office 365, Gmail (App Password required), SendGrid, Mailgun, or any standard SMTP server.

SMTP Host:  smtp.office365.com
Port:       587
Security:   STARTTLS
Auth:       Username / Password

Microsoft Teams Alerts

1. In Teams, go to the channel you want alerts in
2. Click ··· → Connectors → Incoming Webhook
3. Give it a name (e.g. "PulseOps") and click Create
4. Copy the webhook URL
5. Paste it into Settings → Notifications → Teams Webhook URL

PulseOps sends rich Adaptive Cards with colour-coded severity, server name and alert details.

Slack Alerts

1. Go to api.slack.com/apps and create a new app
2. Enable Incoming Webhooks and add a webhook to your workspace
3. Copy the webhook URL (starts with https://hooks.slack.com/services/...)
4. Paste it into Settings → Notifications → Slack Webhook URL

Escalation Rules

Go to Monitoring → Advanced Monitoring → Escalation tab. Define rules that trigger if an alert is not acknowledged within a set time, e.g. send to an on-call Slack channel after 30 minutes.

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Uptime Reports

Go to Reports → Uptime Report. Select a time period and server list. PulseOps calculates uptime percentage from the monitoring history in your SQL Server database and generates a report you can export as HTML or CSV.

SLA Reports

Available in Professional and Enterprise. Go to Reports → SLA Report. Set your SLA target (e.g. 99.9%) and the report shows:

• Uptime percentage per server
• Whether each server met the SLA target
• Incident count, longest outage, MTTR and MTBF

Export as a professional HTML report suitable for management or clients, or as CSV for further analysis.

Scheduled Reports

Go to Configure → Report Schedules to set up automatic report delivery by email, Teams or Slack. Supports daily, weekly, monthly and custom schedules.

Export & CSV

Go to Reports → Export History to export raw monitoring data (metrics, alerts, service statuses) as CSV files for use in Excel or other tools.

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Running as a Windows Service

By default PulseOps only monitors while the application is open. To monitor 24/7 without anyone logged in, install it as a Windows Service:

1. Open Settings → Service
2. Click Install Service
3. Choose the service account (Local System or a domain account)
4. Click Start Service

The service starts automatically on boot and runs in the background. You can still open the UI at any time to view the dashboard and manage configuration.

Server Lists

Go to Configure → Server Lists to organise servers into named groups (e.g. "Production", "Domain Controllers", "SQL Servers"). Server lists are used in uptime and SLA reports to filter results.

Licence Management

Go to Help → Licence Manager to view your current licence status or activate a new key. Licence keys are validated offline — no internet connection is required for activation.

Trial licences allow monitoring of up to 5 servers for 30 days with full Professional features. After purchase, enter your key to unlock the full server limit for your tier.

System Requirements

See the full system requirements on the Download page.