Can someone explain the fail if found parameter when building an HTTP monitor?

Question

I am looking to monitor some intranet web servers. I have configured then within the APM 2.0 with a search for text on the page to ensure that the page works. When the monitor is activated, it states that the monitor is in a downed state and the web page is not active. This is not the case as I log in to the intended web page and all is OK. If I go to the monitor and check fail if found, the application goes green and appears to be up. My interpretation of fail if found is that if it finds the text, the monitor should report it as down, The exact opposite is happening. What am I missing? Thanks for any help

josh.clark · Answer

The thing to realize about the search functionality is that it searches the page source, not what is displayed in the browser.

To emulate what APM does, goto the target URL, right click an View Source.  The HTML of that target URL should open up in Notepad.  Search the page for the text you are looking for.  If it is there, APM should be able to find it too.

We've had people search for two words before (say "Hello World") and they could find it.  It turns out that the raw HTML source had a new line between the words (Hello was on a different line than World).  Since HTML usually doesn't show whitespace, this looked the same in the browser.

DaveMc · Answer

Thanks, took off search for this text and it seems to be working.  Need to test some more.

josh.clark · Answer

My interpretation of fail if found is that if it finds the text, the monitor should report it as down,

That is correct.  The idea is that if you expect to see "ERROR!!" when the web site is broken, you can say "search for this text" and if we find it, we'll mark the component as down.

What is the exact error message you are getting?  If you remove the search text, does the component show as up?