HTTP Content

This monitor requests a URL and checks the HTTP response against an expected content. If the response does not return the expected content, the monitor fails. You can use this monitor to ensure that your web pages are available for viewing, to check if a page renders properly on specific browsers, or even to check for the presence/absence of specific content. If the monitor does not find the specified content, the monitor is considered Down. As an example, check a page for a string like "Introducing WhatsUp Gold 2019" after a certain date, and if the monitor doesn't find it, then the monitor fails, and you know to update your web page.

This monitor now supports additional authentication methods for 401 challenge-based authentication. Note, this does not cover form-based authentication where a user would enter a username/password combination into a standard web form. Often internal systems run with self-signed certificates, you can now use this monitor against web pages running self-signed certificates. If you have SSL certificate errors on your webpage, like you may find on internal websites, an actual user may choose to ignore those errors and continue to the page. Previously, this scenario would cause the monitor to halt. Now, the HTTP Content Monitor supports an option to ignore SSL Certificate errors, just as a user may do, so you can monitor web pages behind any of your SSL certificates, regardless of their validity.

Now, you can also choose to have the monitor fail if a specified string is found, which is useful for detecting specific error messages. Lastly, the monitor can be created more generically than in the past, with the use of a %device.hostname variable, so you can create one monitor for use against multiple servers, such as mirrored sites. This monitor continues to support string matching with regular expressions, so you can set up robust search criteria.

Provide a unique name and description for the monitor, then configure the following:

Use in rescan. Enable this option to have the monitor appear in Device Properties. If enabled, clicking Rescan Device from the device management actions menu within the Device Properties interface adds the monitor to the selected device if the applicable protocol or service is active on that device.
Timeout. Enter the length of time WhatsUp Gold attempts to connect to the selected device. When the specified time is exceeded without connecting, a timeout occurs and WhatsUp Gold stops trying to connect to the server. This is considered a failed connection.
Monitor webpage content. Click Edit content to specify the location to check for HTTP content. The URL must begin with a proper URI, such as http:// or https://. The URL can include the full path to the document including the document's file name and any query string parameters. For example, http://www.example.com/reports.htm?ReportID=100. Please note, this field supports the use of the following percent variables: %Device.HostName and %Device.Address. Configure the following additional settings for the URL:
- Use authentication mechanism. Enable and select Basic, Negotiate, or NTLM. If None is selected, WhatsUp Gold will not attempt to authenticate. Negotiate is recommended for Windows-based system. When this option is enabled You must also provide a valid username and password.
- Proxy server. If the specified content is behind a proxy server, enter the IP address of the proxy server.
- Proxy port. Port on which the proxy server listens.
- Ignore Certificate Errors. Enable this checkbox to force WhatsUp Gold to disregard any certificate errors.
- User agent. Select a browser from the list. The user agent string identifies which web browser is making an HTTP request. Use this feature to imitate your website being visited by various browsers. The user agent from the latest version of the browser is populated for the browser you select.
- Custom headers. Click the add icon to specify up to three headers for which you want to check.

Important: Errors can result when using invalid custom headers or when modifying headers which do not allow modification, such as the HTTP Host header. Click Request URL contents in the monitor configuration interface to test custom headers. If a problem with the header exists, WhatsUp Gold displays an error message. For example, the message "An error occurred with the requested website. Error: The 'Host' header cannot be modified directly. Parameter name: name." indicates the user entered Host:myhost.com as a custom header when the Host header cannot be modified.

Search for content. Content to search for on the specified website as either Plain text or a Regular expression. Please note, this monitor uses standard regular expression processing as supported by the .NET framework.

Important: Depending on your individual monitor and/or application settings, the HTTP Content active monitor may not recognize HTML tags entered in the Web page content to find field. If you experience this behavior, you can troubleshoot using several methods. First, you can simply remove any HTML tags from your search content. Second, you can launch the WhatsUp Gold admin console and disable FIPS mode as enabling this feature causes WhatsUp Gold to add a space within each HTML tag to ensure a more secure networking environment. Third, you can enable the Use regular expression option.

Monitor state if content not found. Select the state WhatsUp Gold should report for the monitor in the event the specified content was not found.

Example Content URLs

To check content for the default page of a newly installed IIS server:

http://my-device/iisstart.htm

—where my-device is the hostname or IP address where a fresh instance of IIS is running.

To see how the HTTP Content monitor works, you can test it against one of the example documentation pages hosted by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA):

http://www.example.com