How could I monitor on SAM for the HTML response on a web address?

Question

Hi everyone,

I am facing a problem on the company where i am working and where you may be able to help. I had been monitoring some web addresses for the past year and suddenly experience a problem with 2 websites.

The first website came back with an HTML response 503. So the monitor I got was actually pinging the website through the website domain name and i discovered that even with the HTML response was 503, the website was working from the monitor point of view.

The second website got a password; so, my users suddenly where asked to provide their credentials when previously was not required.

In conclusion, the monitor I was using was not prepared to handled this events. I am looking now for some options to monitor/alert wen this type of changes came up again on the future.

Suggestions?

Best regards,

Miguel Cortinas

m-milligan · Answer

Here's an extract from the code I used. The try{} block includes the call to the website. $WebRequest.GetResponse() will fail if the HTTP response is anything other than 200(OK), so the catch{} block handles that

# Initialize the web request
[Net.HttpWebRequest] $WebRequest = [Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create("https://$TestURL")

# GetResponse() throws an error if the status code is anything EXCEPT 200/OK.
# There may still be a certificate we can examine if the status is not 200/OK
# so the catch block will handle that.
try{
    [Net.HttpWebResponse] $Response = $WebRequest.GetResponse()
    $WebRequest.Abort()
    $exit_code = 0;
}
catch{
    # This is where you would examine the HTTP response. 
    # If the code is acceptable, exit a value of 0 (means the test is OK/Up)

if ($_.Exception.Message -match "(503)") {
        $exit_code = 0;
    } else {
        $exit_code = 1;
    }
}

exit $exit_code;

m-milligan · Answer

I had a similar situation. I wrote a Powershell script to request a URL and to examine the HTML response. My script then exited with an appropriate exit code based on the HTML response. If I can find the script I will share it with you.