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Documentation for APM probes?

viol8tor

Is there any documentation available for creating your own probes?

- For example, take the Tomcat Server probes in the the Tomcat Server components.

There are many applications that publish a 'stats' URL that I would like to turn into an APM component monitor.

(This is easily done in Splunk, but would like the added benefit of multiple tools monitoring these parameters.)

-v

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RogerWong

You can't create/invent your own component types, but all the different types are listed and described in the help:

http://www.solarwinds.com/netperfmon/SolarWinds/OrionAPMPHComponentTypes.htm

You can write scripts if there is something you want to monitor that isn't already accommodated by a built-in component type.

Scripting Custom Component Monitors

RogerWong

From what you've written, I'd recommend that you take a look at the Apache template that ships with Orion APM.

All the components in the Apache template are Linux Script monitors, each containing a script that reads a stat from the Apache server status web page.

Looking at the script used in any of those components should give you an idea of the kind of script you would need to write to obtain data from some other web page.

viol8tor

Hi Roger,

Thanks for the response, but I'm not quite sure how the Apache Template from 2.0 is relevant. It runs a perl script locally on the Apache Server and does an SNMP get for the Apache MIB.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong one? I looked at the Tomcat one, which looked very promising, but it has a custom probe associated with it.

I have many applications that post their status via a static URL in XML format. Unfortunately, I don't have admin access to these servers, so my monitoring these applications are dependent on converting the XML key value pairs into statistics that APM can display.

I'll go back over the docs again, but if you have another example let me know.

Thanks for your time.

-v

RogerWong

It sounds to me as if you need to write a script that does the following:

1. Requests a web page.

2. Searches through the retrieved web page to locate a marker of some kind that immediately precedes the data you want.

3. Extracts the data and reports it to Orion APM as a statistic.

The Apache template contains several scripts that do that on Linux (check out the 'TotalTraffic' component script), but as you point out, you don't have login access to the webserver you want to get the page from. That's actually not too big of a barrier, because you can use any Linux server as the 'target' as long as you hardcode the URL into the script. The script would run on the Linux server, query the webserver, and then return the statistic to APM.

Using a proxy Linux server to run your scripts isn't ideal though, so the other solution would be to write a Windows vbscript to do the same thing.

I don't have any example code from our own monitors I can point you to for a vbscript, but I google searched vbscript extract data from web page and found some code snippets on the web. It's far from a complete solution, but it might get you started:

http://computerprogramming.suite101.com/article.cfm/using_vbscript_to_extract_data_from_a_web_page

viol8tor

Hi Roger,

I really do appreciate your feedback. It's just a shame that we can't actually develop our own probes, as the Tomcat probe does exactly what I'm looking for. (Readying stats from an XML URL).

Aside from adding my own key pairs, I would add a proxy section for the Tomcat Server components a la HTTP component monitor.

As for proxying and programing an external server to run a script sort of defeats my purposes. I already have Splunk, which created the monitor I'm looking for in a matter of minutes.

(I'm going to iframe the Splunk output in SW until a native solution is available.)

Thank you for trying.

-v