Re: Web Server Monitoring

[Vladimir Parkhaev <vladimir () arobas net>]

Quoting Tony Turner (tnyturner () mindspring com):
> What is the best way to monitor these servers?

Well, first you have to decide what 'monitoring servers' is...
There are dozens of free/commercial tools out there. Big business
uses tools like HP OV, BMC Patrol, Unicenter TNG which are totally
useless tools IMHO considering the $$, their complexity and what they actually
deliver. Free tools include BigBrother, Mon, etc.  I personally recommend 
Nagios (formally NetSaint). 

Now getting back to defining what 'monitoring web server' is -
- is the box itself s up and ruining ? i
  (ICMP ping test)
- is web server software (Apache/ISS) up and running ? (
  (TCP connections to ports 80/443)
- is your application is up and running ?
  (HTTP GET request)
- is your web site serves the _expected_ content (or is it 0wn3d)?
- can your customers login ?

and if the answer is 'No' to any of these questions -
- why not?

Your monitoring should answer all these questions. There are multiple ways 
to go about it. Here is one:

Use Nagios for ruining your tests and notification. Develop in-house
Perl scripts (using LWP module) to script your typical customer session
and run them from Nagios. 
Your script should:
- get the splash page (tests connectivity && web server functionality)
- login with a specially created test account (tests your application functionality)
- fetch subsequent page or 2, generate MD5 sigs on them 
  (well, provided they are not too dynamic) 
  and compare against previously stored values (this is your content test)

If any of these steps fail, indicate where the failure took place.


Anyhow, this has nothing to do with firewalls... Good luck....


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