The following HowTo describes setting up Zenoss to monitor webpages, defined by domain name and url, with HttpMonitor. You will setup needed devices, create a performance template based on HttpMonitor, and combine them to utilize graphs and thresholds of page load times. With a minimal amount of setup, you can have graphs of page load time, page size, alerts on uptime, and more for important websites.

Enterprise customers are strongly advised to use ZenWebTX instead of HttpMonitor, unless their goals are very simple.

In addition to the HttpMonitor Core ZenPack, there is another ZenPack related to web monitoring available for Enterprise customers: ZenWebTX. ZenWebTx extends Zenoss’ web monitoring capabilities beyond the simple uptime, load time, and size checks available in the Core version.

With ZenWebTx you can have Zenoss navigate through your entire web application checking for compliance at each step. Multiple timers can be set along the way to measure response time for each operation of the synthetic transaction as well as the total time for the entire transaction to complete.

For more information, please contact the Zenoss client services team.

HttpMonitor is a ZenPack that will add a new DataSource Type for you to use. For each HttpMonitor datasource you setup, you can get 2 datapoints:

• seconds taken to perform the test
• size of page loaded

• Download HttpMonitor here: docs/DOC-3431
• Zenpack install instructions may be found here: community/documentation/official_documentation/zenoss-guide/2.4.3
  In the section called 'Installing Zenpacks'
  

Monitoring a website with the HttpMonitor ZenPack is as simple as monitoring any other sort of node, such as a server. Lets start by setting up a device specific for our use.

• Under the left navigation menu, under ‘Classes’, click on ‘Devices’
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Sub-Devices’, click ‘Add New Organizer...’
• Input the name of the new organizer. It is suggested to name it “Web”
  • You can use this class organizer for all webpages that you want to monitor

• Under the dropdown page menu for /Devices (next to ‘Classes’ tab), click ‘Manage’ > ‘Add Device...’
• Fill the pop-up as follows:
  • Name or IP: ex: “mycooldomain.com”
    • the domain name of the site that you want to monitor, do not include http
  • Device Class:  in this case: “/Web”
    • the UI navigation path that this device will apply to
  • Discovery Protocol: in this case: “none”
    • since http cannot reply to snmp requests, you would just get errors and warnings if you left this on
    • see here for details
  • All rest: defaults
    • see here for details
• Click OK, and up should come the ‘Discover Devices’ page
  • The IP will be found and the device added.
  • If there are problems, be sure the domain you put in as the name can actually resolve on its own.

• Navigate to the device you created
  • you can follow the provided link in the ‘Discover Devices’ page, or navigate to /Devices/Web/mycooldomain.com
• Under the dropdown page menu for /Devices/Web/mycooldomain.com (next to ‘Status’ tab), click ‘More’ > ‘zProperties’
• Fill the settings as follows:
  • Set ‘zPingMonitorIgnore’ to “True”
    • for the same reason as above.
  • Set ‘zSnmpMonitorIgnore’ to “True”
    • you won’t be monitoring your site with SNMP, and this will keep you from seeing errors regarding the agent being down
  • Click ‘Save'

Next we will actually encounter HttpMonitor when setting up a Performance Template. It is useful in most cases to create a general Performance Template on the /Devices/Web class, and apply that to devices you add (i.e. each site). Then for special cases, like sites requiring authentication, you can create specific Performance Templates on those devices.

• Navigate to the /Devices/Web class
• Click the ‘Templates’ tab
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Available Performance Templates’, click ‘Add Template...’
• Enter a helpful name for the performance template in the ID field, such as “webPageChecker”
  • Your new Performance Template should show up on the list as: webPageChecker  /Devices/Web

• Click on the new Performance Template ‘webPageChecker’
  • You will now be located at the /Devices/Web/Templates/webPageChecker
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Data Sources’, click ‘Add DataSource...’
• Fill the pop-up as follows:
  • ID: ex: “webPage”
    • the name of the DataSource you are creating
  • Type: choose “HttpMonitor”
    • listing of DataSource types
• Click OK, and you now can configure the specifics of your new Data Source
• Fill out the settings as follows:
  • Severity: “Error”
    • When this check fails, the event added will be of the severity you set, so Error or higher is likely appropriate.
  • Host Name: "${dev/id}"
    • This field defines the hostname to hit. Be careful here. The example above assumes that your device is named after a host name. If your devices name is win2kserver, you will need to manually type the webpage host name in here.
      
  • Url: “/”
    • The Url is what the check will hit. “/” is default, and this path is appended to the id of the device it is applied to. Thus in the example case, it would hit “mycooldomain.com/”. This would be appropriate to monitor your homepage.
  • See this Data Source Settings for more details
• Click ‘Save’

Now you need to bind your new Performance Template to the /Devices/Web class you added. This allows any new device added to the /Devices/Web class to inherit the performance template settings that you created above.

• Navigate to the /Devices/Web class
• Click on the ‘Templates’ tab
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Available Performance Templates’, click ‘Bind Templates...’
• Select ‘webPageChecker’, the Performance Template you just added
  • Make sure to unselect the one that is selected by default (hold CTRL). The reason you unbind the default is that it monitors uptime with ping, which you do not want for monitoring a website.
  • This will bind your Performance Template to the class you are currently on, in this case /Devices/Web
  • All website devices you create under /Devices/Web will inherit the ‘webPageChecker’ Performance Template, and therefore be monitored using HttpMonitor!

Now you have all the pieces in place to begin USING HttpMonitor! We will setup a graph and threshold based on page load time. Having page size and load time graphs can be helpful ways to quickly see whether your site is responding slowly for users over time, when, etc.

• Navigate to the performance template that you created, ‘webPageChecker’
  • The above is in /Devices/Web, then click on the ‘Templates’ tab, then click ‘webPageChecker’
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Graph Definitions’, click ‘Add Graph...’
• Fill the ID as something like ex: “responseTime”
  • this will be the name of the Graph you are creating
• Fill out the settings as follows:
  • Units: “seconds”
    • This is just a label for the graph
  • All rest: defaults
• Click ‘Save’
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Graph Points’, click ‘Add DataPoint...’
• Fill the pop-up as follows:
  • Data Points: Select ‘webPage_time’
• Now, for any device you add in /Devices/Web (or whichever class you bound the template to), you will have this graph available under the Perf tab.

Aside from just knowing if your site is up or down, it is also helpful to know when it is performing outside of ranges you find acceptable. For example, if your homepage takes around 2 seconds to load, you may wish to set a threshold of 4 seconds. Then you could get alerts when your site is taking abnormally long to load and go find out why.

• Navigate to the performance template that you created, ‘webPageChecker’
  • The above is in /Devices/Web, then click on the ‘Templates’ tab, then click ‘webPageChecker’
• Under the dropdown table menu for ‘Thresholds’, click ‘Add Threshold...’
• Fill the pop-up as follows:
  • ID: ex: “long_load_time”
    • the name of the Threshold you are creating
• Fill out the settings as follows:
  • Data Points: ‘webPage_time’
  • Min Value: blank
    • you likely do not want to set a min value.
  • Max Value: ‘2’
    • select something above the average range of your page load times, but not too extreme. Perhaps twice your average load time would be appropriate, or a value you feel is the most tolerable.
  • Event Class: ‘/Status/Web’
    • the class that the event will fall under, can be any class you want
  • Severity: ‘Warning’
    • warning is a sensible level
• Click ‘Save’
• Now whenever your page takes longer than the max, it will throw an warning event!

• Navigate to /Devices/Web/mycooldomain.com
• Click on the ‘Perf’ tab
• Bathe in the glory of your graph!

• To get a threshold to throw an event, right now, you can change your threshold to be very low
• See the above part on threshold settings, and change Max Value: ‘.1’ or something very low
• Navigate to a device that has this performance template bound to it, say /Devices/Web/mycooldomain.com
• Wait for Orange or Red Events to happen, denoted by non-zero #’s.
  • Also, try clicking on the color to get details, or clicking on the ‘Events’ tab

Pertaining to webserver vs website monitoring... how to setup both at same time. Also, how to setup multiple website monitors that resolve to the same IP. This will be covered in a future article. Basically, you add multiple httpmonitor datasources in a single local template.

• Zenoss 2.2+