URL Check Monitor

The URL Check Monitor can be used to monitor availability of any URL. Agentless Monitor will execute that URL with parameters provided and will fetch the response. You can also define validatons to perform on response to validate that proper response is received for the URL. Agentless Monitor will also monitor response time, response code for the URL.

Defining a new monitor

Please refer to the chapter Managing Monitors for the common settings required.

URL Check Options

The Options specific to the URL Check monitor are:

URL (String): The URL whose availability needs to be monitored.

Follow Redirects (boolean): Whether HTTP redirects (requests with response code 3xx) should be automatically followed by this connection.

Time out (secs): Time out in seconds. It is used when opening a communications link to this URL. If the timeout expires before the connection can be established, monitor goes into polling state. A timeout of zero is interpreted as an infinite timeout.

HTTP(S) Request Type (String): Type of the request. Supported values are GET / POST.

POST Parameter(s) (String): If the request type is POST, this value will be passed as post parameters of the request. If there are multiple parameters, please seperate them using an &
Example: name1=value1&name2=value2&name3=value3

Authentication (String): AppPerfect Agentless Monitor support various authentication mechanisms. Please find below details of each authentication scheme supported.

Http Basic Authentication:

Basic authentication is a simple and not very secure authentication scheme which is defined in RFC 2317. The username and password are encoded in base 64 and are therefore easily obtainable by anyone who has access to the packet data. The security of basic authentication can be improved when used with HTTPS, thus encrypting the request and response.

Http digest Authentication:

Digest is a relatively secure scheme based on cryptographic hashes of the username and password, using the MD5 hash algorithm. Digest also provides the ability for the server to prove to the client that it also knows the shared secret (password).

NTLM Authentication:

NTLM is a scheme defined by Microsoft. It is more secure scheme than Basic, but less secure than Digest. NTLM can be used with proxies or servers, but not with both at the same time. If a proxy is being used, then it cannot be used for server authentication. This is because the protocol actually authenticates the TCP connection rather than the individual HTTP interactions. On Microsoft Windows platforms, NTLM authentication attempts to acquire the user credentials from the system without prompting the user's authenticator object. If these credentials are not accepted by the server then the user's authenticator will be called.
Because the Authenticator class was defined prior to NTLM being supported, it was not possible to add support in the API for the NTLM domain field. There are three options for specifying the domain:
a) Do not specify it. In some environments, the domain is not actually required and the application need not specify it. b) The domain name can be encoded within the username by prefixing the domain name followed by a back-slash '\' before the username. With this method, existing applications that use the Authenticator class do not need to be modified, so long as users are made aware that this notation must be used. c) Define system property "http.auth.ntlm.domain", the value of this property will be used as the domain name.

User name (String): User name for the authentication mechanism selected. Not required in case of No Authentication.

Password (String): Password of the user for the authentication mechanism selected. Not required in case of No Authentication.

Domain (String): Domain for NTLM Authentication mechanism. Required only for NTLM Authentication.

Client Certificate (String): If Two-way SSL authentication is required, Please copy the client certificate in AM_INSTALL_HOME/tomcat/webapps/monitor/clientcerts folder. Please provide just the file name of the certificate in the UI.

Certificate Password (String): If Two-way SSL authentication is required, provide certificate password along with client certificate.

Text Validation (String): Enter the text that should be validated in the response after firing the URL. Text will be searched in the response received after firing the URL. If not found the monitor will go into polling state.

Validation Details (String): If text is specified for validation, this property gives additional details:

• Check for presence of text (case-insensitive, not a regular expression) (This is default option)
• Check for absense of text (case-insensitive, not a regular expression)
• Check for presence of text (case-sensitive, not a regular expression)
• Check for absense of text (case-sensitive, not a regular expression)
• Check for presence of text (case-insensitive, is a regular expression)
• Check for absense of text (case-insensitive, is a regular expression)
• Check for presence of text (case-sensitive, is a regular expression)
• Check for absense of text (case-sensitive, is a regular expression)

Proxy Host (String): Proxy host name. Provide if URL needs to be accessed through proxy server.

Proxy Port (String): Proxy port. Provide if URL needs to be accessed through proxy server.

Proxy user name (String): If Proxy server through which this URL is accessed, requires authentication specify user name.

Proxy password (String): If Proxy server through which this URL is accessed, requires authentication specify its password.