APM newbie question

I appreciate this module is for monitoring services on nodes that you already have monitoring capabilities on already. But can this application monitor a http get to a device that is external to your administrative domain, ie. a website on the internet? I would like to have a node poll periodically to a few important websites and monitor its ability to get to them via our proxy servers. I would assume this could be done but am not quite sure how to go about it. Could anyone help me with this? Much appreciated.

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FormerMember

Yes, you can do this with the HTTP monitor, even if they're external.

countdrachma

Denny, thanks. How do you go about this though? If I set up a HTTP monitor to try and get to a specific URL and then apply that monitor to a node, doesn't that mean it's trying to get that URL from that node? Wouldn't the node the monitor is assigned to need to be a node created for the external IP / DNS of the website? Can you just confirm I'm on track here as I can't monitor an external node via ICMP without changes to firewalls / security rules. Thanks gain for your help.

josh.clark

You could create an ICMP node and assign the template to this node. If ICMP doesn't work, then the node will show as down in Orion, but the APM application monitor will still be polled.

Here's another option:

When you create a HTTP (or HTTPS) component monitor, you can specify the the URL you want to monitor. The default (http://${IP}:${PORT}/) uses the special value ${IP} which gets replaced with the IP Address. If you don't include the special variable, then there is nothing tieing this monitor to the node it is assigned to.

So, you could create a component monitor with a url of http://www.google.com and assign this to any node and it will monitor google.com to see if they ever go down.

countdrachma

Thanks Josh. I've actually tried both approaches but I can't get either to work through our proxy. In the http monitor template, it specifies a proxy port. Is this supposed to be the port the assigned node uses to reach the URL? I have allocated a http monitor to a node and this http monitor specifies the proxy address. However, what I don't understand is how this poll actually works;

- is it the assigned node that polls and then just informs Orion of its ability to accomplish the task ?

- or, does Orion actually perform the poll on behalf of the assigned node somehow?

I can't quite get my head around it! Thanks in advance for clarifying this for me!