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Monitor an external URL

I just want to monitor a simple URL, like www.google.com and verify that it is up.

How do I do this with APM and NPM? Obviously I don't want to create a node, or monitor one of my current nodes. I just want to know if the URL sends me back a valid page.

I have plenty of internal web pages I monitor with web check, logging in and what not. But for the life of me I can't figure out how to monitor just a plain external URL...

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Accepted answers

quinne

Turns out I had to uncheck "follow redirects".

Working now. Thanks everybody for the quick replies.

All comments

RogerWong

There are a couple ways, but the best is to add www.google.com as an external node, and then assign an HTTP component monitor to it.

You can find detailed step-by-step instructions for this scenario and others in the Orion APM Evaluation Guide. See the section in there titled Monitoring Internal and External Web Site Performance.

quinne

I have followed those instructions and upon testing I get -

The remote server returned an error: (406) Not Acceptable.

A little more information if it helps -

The web server I'm wanting to check sits behind an ASA which nats it's public address to a private address. The private address is a virtual server on a foundary load balancer.

I can type the IP address into a web browser and it will return a web site.

I'm at a loss here...how hard is it to get APM to monitor an external web site? sheesh...

byrona

Monitoring external websites is typically very easy to do.

Few questions for you...

Did you setup an external node to assign the monitor to?
Did you use the HTTP monitor and customize it for the URL that you want to monitor?
For the website you are trying to monitor; can you pull it up on a browser from your polling server?
1. If this works in a browser and you replicate that in the poller it should work perfectly

quinne

Turns out I had to uncheck "follow redirects".

Working now. Thanks everybody for the quick replies.