# remotehosts - monitor remote simplemonitors

This monitor inspects the state of the local simplemonitor instance to check expected remotes are sending data to it.

Warning

At startup, simplemonitor doesn’t know any remote hosts. They’ll only be known once they’ve connected once, which means this monitor may fail initially. Consider using the `tolerance` option to reduce false positives.

hosts
  Type:

    comma-separated list of string

  Required:

    true

  the remote hosts to expect. This will need to be a list of IPs as simplemontitor doesn’t reverse-lookup connections. However, if you want to give names to your remotes, you can use the `custom_name` property of the network logger and then specify that here.

max_age
  Type:

    int

  Required:

    false

  Default:

    300

  the maximum time in seconds since a remote host last contacted us before it’s considered missing

Note

Note that depending on your OS/configuration, you may see IPv4 IPs with a `::ffff:` prefix.

Tip

This monitor reports both missing and unexpected remotes, so you can use that to see what should go in your configuration.