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SAM HTTPS Monitoring Issues

N.Al.Mal

Hello! I am attempting to use the HTTPS monitoring to monitor some internal websites through SAM. I am running into some 403/401 issues and am unsure exactly how to work through this. Most of the sites use smartcard authentication, and many of them work without any additional configuration beyond the suggested from SolarWinds, but some sites are unable to go green under the monitor. Is anyone able to provide any information on how SAM authenticates, specifically for HTTPS monitoring, and how I can further troubleshoot this issue? I have attempted various combinations of settings within the monitor template but none have worked for some of the remaining sites. Most of the sites are hosted on a server that is also being monitored, but one that doesn't work is not on a monitored server. I have verified that all sites that are showing down are up and reachable from host server. I have also attempted different credentials. Thank you!

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Accepted answers

stevenstadel

Check out Netpath (included in the platform) or WPM (Web Performance Monitor—separately purchased module) for this functionality. Our use cases usually involve determining whether a user can reach a particular website. Both solutions use an agent to reach a website, and we can put these in places where users are, not where the SolarWinds pollers are, which gives us better data.

All comments

adam.beedell

Smartcard auth, really? Seems rare!

I imagine if the monitor doesnt have one of these smartcards you'd have a problem. If it does somehow you'd probably need to script it.

There is a log file per component, and you can get more verbose logs with the log adjuster. Log adjuster is on the main polling engine and is searchable. The components one I always forget the location of, it's like /programdir/solarwinds/logs/sam... something. There will be folders or files with the ID of the component, you can get that ID by selecting it in the web console and pulling the ID out of the URL.

Usually the best part of the error is captured in SAM at the time you test it - it should read out on the status/test results section

You may need to run it as a specific account or check TLS/SSL settings or something

vinay.by

Ok makes sense. You did mention 'one that doesn't work is not on a monitored server", have you onboarded your own SolarWinds VM/Server as a managed node in SAM ? If yes create a template on it and place HTTPS URL Monitoring in that template. Even before doing that, login/RDP into your SolarWinds VM/Server and try to open this URL (the problematic URLs) on your SolarWinds VM/Server, open a browser (Chrome/Edge) paste the URL that you want to monitor and check what happens - can you open the URL from here ? This is the first step. If you can then as mentioned above do the following steps, if you cant then figure out why you cant open that URL on your SolarWinds VM/Server.

In simple terms can you open the HTTPS url on other boxes (like mentioned above on SolarWinds VM), if you can't then what is the reason ? Can you enable or whitelist or what ever to open it from your SolarWinds VM ? If this can be achieved the same can be monitored using SAM.

Basically you need to figure out if URL can only be opened outside, if yes - then what is it that is required to do this.

N.Al.Mal

We use a lot of smartcard authentication! Government stuff.. ya know! I will check that out, but based on our needs, I wonder if there is a way to write a script to input into a template. ALL we really need out of this is a ping to the website for an easy check for outages. They are all pingable websites, and those in charge just want to have a simple way to view for hard up/down. I am not super up to speed with SolarWinds and newer to the field, so I may well be missing something simple in the platform for this. I would love to improve upon the monitoring with SAM and further statistics, but a simple solution may be what we need for now, if its at all possible!

stevenstadel

N.Al.Mal

I am setting up NetPath to see how that goes for our purposes. Do you know if this just hits the server that hosts it (many of the IPs for the websites are shared with the servers that host them) or does it hit the website itself? I just wonder whether it would know if, for example, IIS was shutdown for the website but the server itself was up. I assume it would attempt to resolve the hostname and would fail if the website were down in any capacity, as I input them as their URLs, but just want to be sure I understand how this process works. Thank you for your response and patience with my limited knowledge!