Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

The Internet is a great resource, but it is sometimes too much to wade through hundreds of web pages looking for tips about using Tomcat with a database. So we at Monitis have done it for you! Below are some of the more useful tips found in various places on the Internet.

Monitis is pleased to present the following tips for configuring Apache Tomcat for maximum performance. Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

 In this article we’ll discuss creating a command line interface to query the Monitis Agents and Monitors you have activated for your systems. We’ll provide the source code for the utility in VBScript and we will also be working on a C# version.  We’ll keep things simple for now and start with VBScript and provide a link to the complete source at the end of this article.

To get started we need to identify what information we want to display from our Monitors, what can be easily supported, and what is not supported.  The main parts are the different types of agents that Monitis offers, which are the Internal,
External, and custom monitors.

In this article we’ll focus on the basic ‘framework’ of the utility that deals with the definition of some classes to make working with the various agents and monitors easier, accepting and processing command-line arguments, and a small function library to keep our main script very clean. We’ll introduce a neat little feature of VBScript showing you how to work with include files.

Testing Web Content with Monitis, Excel, and PowerShell

In the last few articles, we’ve shown you how easy it is to monitor anything with the open source Monitis PowerShell Module.  Last time, we covered how to interact with web applications, and before that, you got a small taste of how working in a real scripting language like PowerShell can make it miles easier to add batches of monitors.

Today, we’re going to cover two more parameters of Add-MonitisExternalMonitor that makes it easy to build web content, and then we’re going to build a really simple way to make use an excel spreadsheet to create all of your web monitors in PowerShell.

Monitoring Web Applications with Monitis

We’ve been learning about a lot of cool things we can do with the Monitis PowerShell Module, which is built on top of the Monitis REST API.  Yesterday, we saw how we can use a simple script to monitor as many domains as we want.  The day before that, we saw how we can seamlessly manage all of our monitors.  Today, we’re going to cover monitoring web applications.

As a reminder, start out by running PowerShell, and running the command:  Import-Module Monitis.  Then use the Connect-Monitis command and your APIKey and SecretKey to connect.  From then on in, you’ll reuse your keep for every operation.

Mining External Monitor Results with Monitis and PowerShell

In the last article, we walked thru some of the other commands related to external monitors.  Today, we’ll focus on the one you’ll probably use the most:  Get-MonitisMonitorResult.

Before we get started, please remember to download the Monitis module from Monitis’ github open source repository.  Download it to Documents\WindowsPowerShell\modules, and import it in PowerShell by running Import-Module Monitis.

Get-MonitisMonitorResult gives you results from any type of Monitor.  You use it by piping in the monitors you want.

HTTP what?

Yes, HTTP extraction. Imagine you have a web page you would like to probe for parameters. Such as the number of your twitter subscribers, or the temperature somewhere – and profile it in Monitis.
Or another scenario could be to probe the responsiveness of your website – how fast is it?
Was it compromised and defaced?
I think you get the point – it is needed and important.

Managing External Monitors with Monitis and PowerShell

In the last article, we got started with how to create a simple external monitor with Monitis in PowerShell.  The command you use is Add-MonitisExternalMonitor.  You’ll have to import the Monitis module first to use it (Import-Module Monitis).

Monitis lets you monitor everything, and when you manage those monitors with PowerShell life gets a lot easier.  In PowerShell, commands normally come in little families.  To see all of the other things you can do with external monitors, run: