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ipMonitor 10 - updating HTTP: User Experience Monitor using API

ipMonitor Info:

  Version: 10.0

  Build: 1371

Hoping someone might be able to provide some insight on an issue i'm having...

I work for a small-midsize ASP/Hosting company. We develop and host our application on our equipment and host it to our customers over HTTP/HTTPS. Occasionally our app crashes or becomes unresponsive so i have created a monitor in ipMonitor called HTTP: User Experience which sends an HTTP request to a specific .jsp of the app to see if it responds. The monitor grabs the file size and checksum of the specified URL and matches it to the values that were saved in the monitor when it was initially created.

My issue is that we make regular changes and updates to our app which means we need to recompile the code. When we do this, the .jsp that we query gets changed (every single jsp gets touched) so the checksum of the file comes back different than what was originally set in the monitor which causes it to go red and send alerts regardless of whether or not the page is responsive. The only way to rectify the issue is to manually login to ipMonitor, navigate to the monitor, select update under the Analysis of test results section, and then select apply once the new checksum is generated. We make changes so often that this can be a pain and a lot of times people either forget to do it or just don't bother since they know someone else will.

I have been working with the API (via PowerShell) for quite awhile to disable/enable monitors or make changes to drive space thresholds so i'm pretty familiar with it but i can't figure out how to initiate the update to get the new checksum. I can manually change the values but i don't know what ipMonitor is using to get the checksum. It's definitely not MD5 or SHA... it looks like it may be some sort of CRC but i haven't been able to reproduce a checksum using any of my tools.

Does anyone know what ipMonitor uses to get the checksum for HTTP requests??

Or better yet, does anyone know if there is a way to initiate an update through the actual API?

Here is a picture of the monitor for clarification:
pastedImage_5.png

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

  • Have you tried using a standard HTTP or HTTPS monitor?

  • Sorry for the slow response.

    Yes we have tried that however it does not suit our needs. We are using IBM WebSphere alongside IIS to host our application. If there is no issue with IIS but for some reason WebSphere stops responding to requests, the regular HTTP/HTTPS monitors will not pick up on it. The HTTP User Experience monitor works perfectly since it actually requests something from the site but it requires the checksum to be generated every time there's a change (which makes sense).

    I just need to know what algorithm ipMonitor uses for this checksum so i can script the change. I am able to change the value to whatever i want using the API but since i don't know how to generate the checksum i am stuck. I am able to grab the file length directly from the .jsp so i'm halfway there. Unfortunately, It doesn't appear a standard CRC calculator (such as this one) gives the number that ipMontior needs.

  • Bump

    EDIT:

    I'm guessing the checksum they use for this monitor is the same for the file monitor so if anyone knows what that is then i could go from there!

  • Hi  
    Can you please share the code that you are using to disable\enable the monitors, I need this to perform some tasks.