IP Custom Services
For 
White Paper
September 22, 2000
Updated: July 5, 2001
Table of Contents
Introduction.............................................................................................................................................................. 3
Basic HTTP Availability...................................................................................................................................... 4
Page Content Availability............................................................................................................................... 9
Page Availability with Login........................................................................................................................ 13
POP3 Login Custom Service........................................................................................................................ 15
Basic Application Custom Service......................................................................................................... 16
Cold Fusion to Oracle:..................................................................................................................................... 17
Monitoring ASP...................................................................................................................................................... 20
Monitoring Citrix.................................................................................................................................................. 21
Question on “get”
in custom services:............................................................................................. 22
Monitoring a Cisco 3640
Router that is synced to an Internet time source........... 23
Conclusion................................................................................................................................................................ 24
Introduction
WhatsUp Gold has become an
important part of our management solution.
Both Phil and I have worked with several enterprise class network
monitoring solutions. We have found
WhatsUp Gold to be the best overall solution for monitoring devices, basic web
site/page availability and WindowsNT services. Because of our experience with
different alternatives we thought this paper might help evaluators of WhatsUp
Gold “cut to the chase” and quickly realize the flexibility of this product and
better expedite the process of determining whether WhatsUp Gold fits the unique
needs of each environment.
Phil and I enjoyed putting
this paper together and would appreciate any additions. If you are interested, please follow our
format and send Michael Patterson the instructions for your custom service as
outlined in this paper. Please
indicate if we have permission to list your name with the service.
Because we both have
demanding occupations, we don’t want to become an alternative to the IPSWITCH
Telephone Support Organization. They
can be reached at (781) 676-5700. Have
your service contract number (e.g. SWG1111) ready or be prepared to purchase one
for a few hundred dollars. Their
support is phenomenal and well worth adding to your purchasing decision. The team at IPSWITCH was instrumental in
helping us create this paper.
Good luck with your copy
of WhatsUp Gold and don’t forget to join the WhatsUp Gold forum. Phil and I can be reached there as well.
Sincerely,
Phil Morneault
Central Maine Power
Company
philip.morneault@cmpco.com
Michael Patterson
Somix Technologies, Inc.
---------------------
July 5, 2001 added
sections on: Cold Fusion to Oracle, ASP, Citrix, “get” question and Cisco Sync
Internet Time.
---------------------
Basic HTTP
Availability
A common request on the
forum is for WhatsUp Gold to monitor the availability of a web server. This service demonstrates WhatsUp Golds
ability to monitor the root page of a web site with a simple HEAD request.
To figure out what you
need to send to the web server from WhatsUp Gold, launch the telnet program,
turn on local echo and configure a connection as shown below using the port the
host is serving the application on:
Once the connection is
made, a request needs to be sent to the server for the root page
(index.html). This is done to see the
server’s standard response and is executed with the HEAD command which will
query the server for the availability of the page but not actually return the
content of the entire page.
HEAD is leveraged because
it will not count as a HIT against the web server in the statistics. NOTE:
while performing this test no TYPOS can be made!! If a typo is made,
simply close the session and restart.
Upon connection to the
server type:
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Hit enter twice after
completing the above.
The web server should
respond with something similar to what is shown below:
This server responded with
the following and then closed the connection:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server:
Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP1
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000
12:54:52 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Connection: close
“HTTP/1.1 200 OK” is all
that is needed in WhatsUp Gold to make our custom service work.
Create a custom TCPIP
service in WhatsUp Gold and enter the following:
Remember, the \n\n must be
entered to signify completion of the request after the “HEAD / HTTP/1.0\n\n”
text in the “Send command on connect” box.
\n = line feed
\r = carriage return
Save the new custom
service and apply it to your server icon as show below:
It is often a good idea to
watch the debug log after your custom service has been applied to an icon to
watch for any errors. See below:
If an error had been made
in the creation of the custom service the error would be shown above in the
debug log. For example, if we had used
/r/n in lieu of /n/n in the custom service an error would have occurred. Please see below for an incorrect
configuration:
The consequences of the \r
error made above can be seen immediately when the Save button is pressed. The debug log will show the error as
follows:
The debug log is a
valuable resource when configuring custom services. It also helps to temporarily increase the polling interval of the
icon to 10 seconds during the creation of the custom service.
Page
Content Availability
Next we will monitor a
specific web page for content. This
will require using the GET command, remember this will now cause hits in the
statistics. The following is the page
we want to ensure the availability of.
Using TELNET again, send a
GET request to the server specifying the full path to the page.
Now send the command with
two returns and you should see the HTML code returned to you. If it is a long page, it may scroll off the
top. NOTE: Resize the terminal buffer size to allow viewing of a full page
of response (remember the Windows telnet window will not allow
scroll back!)
If the goal is to ensure
that the telephone number listed on a web page is correct for the support
organization, WhatsUp Gold will need to look for {207 324-8805}. To have WhatsUp Gold perform this function,
we need to configure the following in the “Send command on connect” box:
“GET
/reports/inventory/inventory_index.html HTML/1.0\n\n”.
In the “Expected command
response” box put in: 207 324-8805
Again, use the debug log
to trouble shoot any anomalies.
Page
Availability with Login
The following example
describes how to configure a custom service in WhatsUp Gold using login
authentication. For simplicity, we will
use the same web page using “HEAD” in lieu of “GET”.
We need to capture the
encrypted login authorization string sent from a browser with a packet
analyzer.
Login to the web page:
We captured our PC sending
the following authentication to the WebNM web server with a packet analyzer:
Notice: “Authorization:
Basic d2Vibm06d2Vibm0=” is the encrypted password.
Now the custom service
needs to be configured. The following needs to be placed in the “Send command
on connect” box:
HEAD
/reports/inventory/inventory_index.html HTTP/1.0\nAuthorization: Basic
d2Vibm06d2Vibm0=\n\n
NOTICE: The structure of
the above command, the 1st half is the same as the Basic HTTP Availability example. The \n is separates the request from the
authorization.
In the “Expected command response” box type in:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
NOTICE: The HTTP version
is 1.1, this needs verified on every server platform.
POP3 Login Custom
Service
The next example explains
how to configure a custom service in WhatsUp Gold to monitor a POP3
service. The default POP3 TCPIP port is
110. To build the “Send command on
connect” string a telnet session must be establish to determine some of the
variables. The telnet session in most
cases will be established on port 110:
Enter “USER
<userID>”
In the above window, we
confirm that the POP3 server is requesting a password.
In the custom service
for “Expect on connect” enter “+OK” and
in the “Send command on connect” box
enter “USER <userID> \n” (e.g. USER attention\n). In the “Expected command response” box put
in “+OK Password”.
Because this actually
initiates a session it is best to close the session by placing “QUIT\n”.
Basic Application Custom
Service
The following is an
example of setting up WhatsUp Gold to monitor a standards based paging server
using SNPP. Most users use the paging
system which comes with WhatsUp Gold however, a good number of installations use
a 3rd party paging system (e.g. Attention, TeleAlert, AlarmPoint,
etc.).
To configure this custom
service the telnet application is generally the application of choice to
collect the necessary information.
Above is the information
received upon initially connecting to the paging server (i.e. no keys have been
pressed).
When “quit” is typed in
followed by the enter key, “221 OK, goodbye” is received as outlined below:
Because the above response
from simply initiating a telnet confirms that the application is running, to
configure the service is very simple.
Cold Fusion to Oracle:
We have set up a WhatsUp Gold custom service that
calls a small Cold Fusion (CF) script which, tries to find a record in the Dual
table. The script returns a WHATSUPOK
if it's been successful, so WhatsUp will trigger off alarms if it receives any
reply but "WHATSUPOK".
Below is the CF script that must be
configured on the Cold Fusion server:
The Cold Fusion script must be present on the
server you’re monitoring, as it’s that WhatsUp object that calls the Custom
Service. The script doesn’t have to be
in any specific place on the server, as long as the path is specified in the
GET command in the Custom Service, but the server does need to have Cold Fusion
running on it, so that the Cold Fusion tags can be interpreted.
<----------Begin CF script -----------ŕ
<CFTRY>
The
below is contained within the CFTRY tag.
See below for details of what this tag does.
<CFQUERY NAME="TEST"
Test
is an arbitrary name given to this particular CF query.
DATASOURCE="DEVELOP">
Data
sources (ie. Databases – eg. an Oracle, or Access database) are set up in Cold
Fusion Studio. This line tells the
query that it’s Data source is “Develop”, which points to our Oracle database.
select * from DUAL
In here are any SQL commands that you want the
query to run. In our case, it’s simply
going to try to select everything from the Dual table, which will always have a
record in it.
</CFQUERY>
<CFCATCH TYPE="Any">
The CFCATCH tag will catch errors. We set it up so that CF will try to run the
commands contained within the CFTRY tags.
If there are ANY errors (ie. CFCATCH TYPE=”ANY”) then CF will perform
whatever is contained within the CFCATCH tags.
In our case, this is nothing, simply to finish the query.
We did this so that if there were any errors trying
to run the SQL command above, the query would quit nicely, without returning
any errors, or trying to resubmit the commands.
</CFCATCH>
</CFTRY>
<CFSET
result="NO">
The only purpose of the script is to return this
variable, ‘result’ to WhatsUp via the HTTP GET request. We have taken a pessimistic view, and
initially set this variable to “NO”.
WhatsUp is only set to look for the value “WHATSUPOKAY”, but we had to
set it to something, so it made sense to set it as “NO”, and let a successful
outcome of this query change it to “WHATSUPOKAY”
<CFIF
isdefined("test.recordcount")>
IF there is a query called test.recordcount, then
the test above was successful. And:
<CFIF test.recordcount gt 0>
IF the
query test.recordcount is greater than 0 (ie. Test contains at least one
record), then:
<CFSET
result="WHATSUPOKAY">
set ‘result’ to “WHATSUPOK”
</CFIF>
</CFIF>
<HTML><BODY><CFOUTPUT>#result#</CFOUTPUT></BODY></HTML>
Outputs a simple html page, containing only the
value of ‘result.’
In our custom service, the Whatsup object sends:
GET /whatsuptest.cfm HTTP/1.0\r\nAccept:
*/*\r\nUser-Agent: Ipswitch_Whatsup/4.0\r\n\r\n
And expects to receive:
~.*WHATSUPOKAY
If not, then it starts the notification process.
I hope this makes sense - if you have any queries
please feel free to get back
in touch.
Andrew Bollington CF Script Writter
Gareth
Tupper WhatsUp Gold Administrator <garetht@ibo.org>
International Baccalaureate Organization
Monitoring ASP
I have a problem with an ASP failing occasionally on one of our
servers, returning:
"error 0115"
We are using WhatsUp 5.1.
In "custom services" what are the correct instructions for
checking that ASP is still working?
Place a file (e.g. test.asp) on the web server. Its contents could contain:
<%
response.write
("ASPOKAY")
%>
Setup WhatsUp Gold to perform a TCP custom service. Connect to port 80 on the target server and
ask for:
HTTP GET
/test.asp
and content scan for
ASPOKAY
Whatever you choose to use as your string in the page and to
test for, make sure it's something that doesn't appear in either headers or
error messages.
Mike T email: webdvlpr@hotmail.com
Monitoring Citrix
Setup a custom service “TCP” connection to the server on port
1494. You should get a response of:
ICA
or similar.
Peter Moss email: moss_peter@hotmail.com
Question on “get”
in custom services:
I am running a website called www.shopClearviewMall.com. It is running on Windows2000 Advanced Server
and IIS 5.0. I need to monitor it to
make sure that the Microsoft Active Server Pages do not fail in the middle of
the night.
The server has one IP address -- 216.3.250.16. I am using "Host Headers" to have
the four following sites bind to the same single IP address:
- www.ShopClearViewMall.com
- www.ShopTheWaterworks.com
- www.ShopCountryClubMall.com
- www.ShopFindlayVillageMall.com
Do you know the syntax of a "Get" in the custom
service for an NT web
server running IIS so that the correct web service will
"fire" and the default.asp page will be "fetched" from the
web server?
I also need to know if you can specify the
UserAgent in WhatsUp as well. If that
page gives an error message pertaining to a "cookie", then /test.asp
will work as well.
Answer:
In Whatsup create a custom service for each
domainname you
want to monitor. In the
"Send command on connect" field enter:
GET /
HTTP/1.1/nAccept: */*/nUser-Agent: Ipswitch_Whatsup/4.0/nHost:www.shopclearviewmall.com/nConnection:
Keep-Alive/nCookie:SITESERVER=ID=f4358ced9cca340f686b78c5f0e8/n/n
Do not put any spaces.
This one is for shopclearviewmall.
Change the
user-agent to emulate what ever host you want. You may want to try it without a
cookie. This command worked for
me. Then in the "Expect on command
response" you can just put the header response of
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
or specify something in the page like </html>
which would wait till the entire page is loaded before considering the page
UP. Do not forget to specify port 80
and the timeout value.
This worked for me and gave me a UP status on your page. I did this by using a packet tracing tool to
capture the request I sent and then copied and pasted it into a telnet session.
Phil Morneault
philip.morneault@cmpco.com
Central Maine Power Company
Monitoring a Cisco 3640
Router that is synced to an Internet time source
Here is what I use to monitor one of our Cisco 3640 routers that
is synced to an Internet time source.
The custom service monitors the router by checking if it is a
NTP time
server and that its stratum level is 2.
Custom service NTP
Port 123
timeout 5
Expect on connect (leave blank)
Send command on connect (enter the string below)
%27%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%
0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0%0
UDP
Expected command response %28%2
Send to Disconnect (leave blank)
Hope that this is somewhat helpful. Del dthompson@bepc.com
Conclusion
The Custom Services option
in WhatsUp Gold is a powerful utility that is often under utilized or not used
at all. If you are still having trouble
with your custom service, consider asking the WhatsUp Gold forum or purchasing
a service agreement to take advantage of the Support Organization at IPSWITCH.
Warm Regards,
Phil Morneault
philip.morneault@cmpco.com
Central Maine Power
Company
Michael Patterson
Somix Technologies, Inc.
If you are looking for a
way to extend the monitoring capabilities of WhatsUp Gold and need to provide
utilization and service level reports, check out Denika and WebNM. It is an enterprise solution that can be
integrated with WhatsUp Gold http://www.somix.com