Benefits

Setup

To create a webcheck from a URL, split the URL into different configuration options. All of these options determine the URL dimension value from its "normalized" URL, which is in the format of {scheme}://{host}:{port}{path}:

• scheme is https if useHTTPS:true, or http if useHTTPS:false.

• host is the host name of the site to check. This option is required.

• port is the port to connect to. If not defined, port is 443 if useHTTPS:true or 80 if useHTTPS:false. The default value for http is 80. If the default value is used, port is removed from the configuration because it is implicit and makes the behavior similar to what curl does.

• path contains the full query including the resource path and finally the GET method parameters with ? separator.

Configure the following options to change the behavior of the request done on this URL:

• Configure the method option to define request types such as GET or POST. See https://golang.org/src/net/http/method.go for the full list of available methods.

• Configure the username and password options for basic authentication.

• Configure the httpHeaders option to define request headers. Use this option to override the host header.

• Configure the requestBody option to provide a body to the request. The form of this body depends on the Content-Type header. For example, {"foo":"bar"} with Content-Type: application/json.

• Configure the noRedirects:false option to stop the URL from following redirects. The default value is true.

See configuration examples for different request behaviors.

The following configuration options change the resulting values:

• The desiredCode option determines the http.code_matched value. Configure this option if you expect a different "normal" value. The default value is 200. For example, configure desiredCode:301 and noRedirects:false to check a redirect (and not the end redirected URL) keeping the value to 1 (success).

• The regex option does the same with the http.regex_matched metric, where the value is 1 only if the provided regex matches the response body.

• The addRedirectURL option does not have impact on metrics, but adds a new dimension redirect_url with a "dynamic" value. If the url dimension changes with the monitor configuration, the redirect_url value is impacted by any server change and is always the last URL redirected. This option is deactivated by default because this could cause issues with heartbeat detectors, for example.

The following HTTP headers let the client and the server pass additional information with an HTTP request or response:

• Cache-Control: no-cache to send the request to the origin server for validation before releasing a cached copy.

• Host to change the request, that is, to bypass CDN or load balancer requesting directly the back end.

• Content-Type to indicate the media type of the resource. For example, json, xml, or octet-stream.

Installation

Configuration

Example

To activate this integration, add the following to your Collector configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/http:
    type: http
    ... # Additional config

Next, add the monitor to the service.pipelines.metrics.receivers section of your configuration file:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/http]

Monitor multiple hosts

To monitor multiple hosts, add an http monitor entry for each host in the receivers section of the configuration. For example:

receivers:
  smartagent/host1:
    type: http
    ... # Additional config for host 1
  smartagent/host2:
    type: http
    ... # Additional config for host 2

Next, add the monitor to the service.pipelines.metrics.receivers section of your configuration file:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/host1, smartagent/host2]

Configuration options

The following table shows the configuration options for this monitor:

Metrics

These are the metrics available for this integration:

Notes

Troubleshooting