Items.  Insider functionality is based on three notions - items, views and alerts. An item can be a database, a file server, a web server, an application - anything you might be interested to see inside out. You start monitoring an item by placing in on Enterprise view. Enterprise view is a special kind of a view in that it is your starting point. Once an item is placed on Enterprise view Insider starts monitoring it by sending periodic requests to it and analyzing the responses it gets.

Views.  Other views allow for a more detailed display of an item's activity. For example, Oracle Instance view is a real-time snapshot of an Oracle instance activity. It displays various Oracle components such as memory regions and data files and their real-time performance metrics.

	Note
	Even if a more detailed view like Instance view is not currently displayed for an item the complete statistics for it is still being gathered

Alerts.  An item such as a database or a file server may encounter a condition that triggers an alert. An alert is a visual notification to the user that something might possibly go wrong with your server. By way of an example free space in your data files might be approaching zero or CPU usage on your web server might be close to 100%. Conditions that require the user's attention are reported as alerts. Alerts are shown on all views but not every alert is shown on every view and not every alerts may make sense for every item. For instance the data file free space alert does not make sense for a web server and is not triggered for one. All alerts are always reported on Enterprise view where you can see them by clicking on the alert icon next to the item the alert is being reported for. You can also access the complete history of alerts for an item by clicking on it and choosing Alert history menu item