URL Monitoring With Nagios

by Bella November 20, 2015

written by Bella

Capabilities

Nagios provides complete URL monitoring of HTTP and HTTPS servers and protocols as well as full URL transaction monitoring.

Benefits

Implementing effective URL monitoring with Nagios offers the following benefits:

>> Increased server, services, and application availability
>> Fast detection of network outages and protocol failures
>> Monitor user experience when accessing URLs
>> Web server performance monitoring
>> Web transaction monitoring
>> URL monitoring

URL monitoring

By using the ‘check_http’ nagios command, we can monitor a specific url rather than checking the Apache service is up or not. This method is helpful to identify if the website is hacked and url is injected with malicious codes or there is some Apache or php errors and page is throwing an error instead. The normal Apache service check will return successful results in the above case.
We can check for a specific keyword string on the webpage. If that string not present, an error will be returned.

Here is an real example :

define service{
    use                            urlmonitoring-service
    host_name                      server.supportpro.com
    service_description            url_check
    check_command                  check_http!-H supportpro.com -t 30 -R “Cpanel and WHM” -f follow
}

The above will check for the keyword “Cpanel and WHM” on the page “supportpro.com”. If the keyword is missing or the page is not responding nagios will return and error.

URL monitoring +SSL

You can refer to below example if the web page has SSL/TLS enabled.

URL monitoring on ht password protected page

Normal method will not work as we need to validate ht password protection first to see the page. You can use the following example for such pages.

define service{
    use                            urlmonitoring-service
    host_name                      server.supportpro.com
    service_description            url_check_protected
    check_command                  check_http!-H supportpro.com -a user:password -t 30 -R “Cpanel and WHM” -f follow –ssl
}

Replace the username and password appropriately.

Make sure you define service ‘urlmonitoring-service’ in your template file.

define service{
        name                            urlmonitoring-service
        max_check_attempts              5
        check_interval                  15
        retry_interval                  2
        check_period                    24×7
        notification_interval           30
        notification_period             24×7
        register                        0
        }