Nagios Support Forum

I looked for Nagios Core plugins that would allow what is called Web transaction monitoring in NagiosXI, but found few useful pieces of advice. There are several plugins listed, but seems to match.

Could someone recommend, if possible, any plugin(s) for Nagios Core that could allow subsequently visit several pages in a row and, optionally, find proper content (say. match a string) at last stage?

-- Sylvester

Hi Sylvester,

The plugin "check_http" in the standard Nagios configuration can test web transactions, but only one transaction at a time (i.e. get a page & check for a string in response, post information to a form & check for string in response, check SSL cert validation, etc.). I'm not aware of anything that chains multiple transactions together. If there are no checks out there that do this, I guess you'd either have to wrap check_http, or write your own plugin.

A Nagios BPI check would let you bundle multiple check_http results into one "meta-service" that you can monitor the status of. Checks wouldn't be sequential, but you'd know if part of the user experience is degraded.

sylvesterc wrote:I looked for Nagios Core plugins that would allow what is called Web transaction monitoring in NagiosXI

Nagios XI uses the WebInject Plugin

Rolling your own check isn't that bad either. curl will do the trick, tracking cookies and responses codes and all that stuff.

Another thing you *could* take a look at is Selenium:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... Nagios.pdf

Thanks to everyone for references and ideas. WebInject ssems a good choice for the time being.

eloyd wrote:Rolling your own check isn't that bad either. curl will do the trick, tracking cookies and responses codes and all that stuff.

That's easy when there's a simple form simple verification. When there are hundreds of such monitors, and/or complex interaction scenarios such as running JavaScript/AJAX interaction, it will become significantly less fun to program/debug and build such scenarios manually/using low-level tools such as curl.

Thanks.

-- Sylvester

True. Which is why Nagios is rarely used as transactional monitoring software. It's tough to have an atomic "OK, WARNING, CRITICAL" state when you're talking about multiple failure points in (for example) an e-commerce transaction of putting something into a cart. Did the image fail to load? The page? Did the add-to-cart fail? Did the database die? Was the form filled out incorrectly? etc.etc.etc.

Honestly, I like LoadRunner (though I must admit that I haven't used the versions since HP bought it) for that purpose. It also does well with distributed load testing, stress testing, and QA work to ensure that a new roll out doesn't break the old one. Just my 3 cents worth.

I agree with eloyd here. While Nagios *can* monitor just about anything, sometimes it's not the right tool for the job. There might be integration possibilities though depending on the transaction tool you use.

So I see there are several good replies to this question, BUT, it has been several years and things do change.
I admit to being a nagios newb and I didn't see an FAQ, but hopefully my questions aren't idiotic.

First, my understanding is that Nagios Core is the free edition, and Nagios XI is pay-to-play. My organization is currently using nagios core 3.4.4

the following "white paper"
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... 1502219514

Seems to indicate that Nagios XI will probably do what we want. Is it difficult to upgrade from core to XI?
Could a more current version of core have the same capabilities?

Thanks
Paul

paradimethyl wrote: Could a more current version of core have the same capabilities?

No version of Core currently has the configuration wizards mentioned in that documentation. WebInject will still work the same in Nagios Core as it does in Nagios XI, it'll just take a bit more time to set up and configure:
https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/P ... ct/details

Alternatively, the documentation for Selenium is mostly applicable to Nagios Core with the exception of configuring a service check:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf