Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
- Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) Take a look at WWW::Mechanize on CPAN. Think of it as a scriptable web browser robot that plugs right into standard perl Test stuff (via Test::WWW::Mechanize) if you want to. You can do a lot with it, including interact with forms and submit them. You could configure a test user account and do a login and logout with (Test::)WWW::Mechanize, checking (with regular expressions if you wish) that RT at a glance page looks about right. - Mikko ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
We also have a basic perl script using WWW::Mechanize which opens the login page, logs in with a 'nagios' user and ensures it gets a valid response (we check for a 200 OK and that the content matches RT at a glance. If this fails it generates a critical nagios alert and wakes the on-call staff up. Regards, Tom On 23/07/2007, at 11:43 PM, Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com -- Tom Lanyon Systems Administrator NetSpot Pty Ltd ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
[rt-users] monitoring RT
We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
Nagios (or something similar) monitoring each of the services seems the easiest way to me. And if RT goes down, just have Nagios send an alert into RT andoh, wait... Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com -- Drew Barnes Applications Analyst Network Resources Department Raymond Walters College University of Cincinnati ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
I suppose I've gotten lucky and never had this happen. One option to check for that is hire a journalism major to hit F5 a lot and make sure the site is working. ;-) Nicholas Clark wrote: Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 10:15:35AM -0400, Drew Barnes wrote: Nagios (or something similar) monitoring each of the services seems the easiest way to me. And if RT goes down, just have Nagios send an alert into RT andoh, wait... Yes, but this doesn't catch the case where the web server is working, the database is working, but the mod_perl has got itself into a state where the database handle is invalid and spewing errors, but DBI still thinks that it's connected. I was already assuming that the low level services could be monitored easily. Nicholas Clark -- Drew Barnes Applications Analyst Network Resources Department Raymond Walters College University of Cincinnati ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
Nicholas Clark wrote: Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 10:15:35AM -0400, Drew Barnes wrote: Nagios (or something similar) monitoring each of the services seems the easiest way to me. And if RT goes down, just have Nagios send an alert into RT andoh, wait... Yes, but this doesn't catch the case where the web server is working, the database is working, but the mod_perl has got itself into a state where the database handle is invalid and spewing errors, but DBI still thinks that it's connected. I was already assuming that the low level services could be monitored easily. Nicholas Clark Hi Nicholas, Nagios seems to me to be good enough for that. For example check_http plugin with sensible options combination will make Nagios to log in - when it fails, you'll know that something went terrible wrong and users can't log in. Is that what you want? David Svejda ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
That's why folks hire system admins - so when things stop working, they can restart them. ;-) Other than monitoring HTTP and MYSQL via Nagios, you could always write a Nagios plugin that would bring up the RT login page and login with a real username and password. If that is successful, then you consider RT to be up. If the login attempt generates errors or times out, then you can assume that RT is 'down' and Nagios generates an alert. James Moseley Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: To rt-users-bounces@ Drew Barnes lists.bestpractic [EMAIL PROTECTED] al.com cc rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com Subject 07/23/2007 09:17 Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT AM Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database without burning lots of CPU? Have I missed anything key to check? On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 10:15:35AM -0400, Drew Barnes wrote: Nagios (or something similar) monitoring each of the services seems the easiest way to me. And if RT goes down, just have Nagios send an alert into RT andoh, wait... Yes, but this doesn't catch the case where the web server is working, the database is working, but the mod_perl has got itself into a state where the database handle is invalid and spewing errors, but DBI still thinks that it's connected. I was already assuming that the low level services could be monitored easily. Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 09:22:31AM -0500, James Moseley wrote: That's why folks hire system admins - so when things stop working, they can restart them. ;-) Other than monitoring HTTP and MYSQL via Nagios, you could always write a Nagios plugin that would bring up the RT login page and login with a real username and password. If that is successful, then you consider RT to be up. If the login attempt generates errors or times out, then you can assume that RT is 'down' and Nagios generates an alert. The (sort of) problem I have is that there are sysadmins, and they use RT as end users (internally) but when I asked them how they wanted to set up monitoring the system (if necessary to wake them up when it needs restarting, or just TLC) I got a sort of meh answer, rather than what I was hoping for. (I wanted We do monitoring like this round here so that there would then be an obvious way to extend that to RT) Hence the slightly daftly phrased question - I was hoping that a good solution already exists that they'd then agree to quickly. Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
Nicholas Clark wrote: Yes, but this doesn't catch the case where the web server is working, the database is working, but the mod_perl has got itself into a state where the database handle is invalid and spewing errors, but DBI still thinks that it's connected. I was already assuming that the low level services could be monitored easily. You could probably write a simple bash script using lynx, wget or curl that would login as a user (might want to create one just for this purpose with very limited rights) and pull up some a small ticket. If you link directly to the ticket then the query would only be pulling out that tickets data rather than pulling RT at a Glance or a search would use more juice than necessary. Jay begin:vcard fn:Jay Lee n:Lee;Jay org:Philadelphia Biblical University;Information Technology Department email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Network/Systems Administrator x-mozilla-html:TRUE url:http://www.pbu.edu version:2.1 end:vcard ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
AW: [rt-users] monitoring RT
The best solution is to do it the way Jay told you. Create a queue for testing, create a user to login from monitoring system and also a test ticket. Then call from the monitoring system the queue or ticket url. Example: http://your.rt.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=123456user=monitorpass=monitor to get your ticket. Together with a small shell or perl scrip you can grab this info from nagios and also from cacti (to get also some performance values) small script from our Unix Gurus to check the time rt needs to serve the site: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/time -o /tmp/rtcheck -f %e wget -q -O /dev/null --header=Host: your.rt.com http://${1}/Ticket/Display.html?id=123456user=monitorpass=monitor; cat /tmp/rtcheck rm /tmp/rtcheck call it with: ./rtcheck.sh Your.physical.host if you have more then one it makes sense to catch also all webservers Torsten -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Nicholas Clark Gesendet: Montag, 23. Juli 2007 16:36 An: James Moseley Cc: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Betreff: Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 09:22:31AM -0500, James Moseley wrote: That's why folks hire system admins - so when things stop working, they can restart them. ;-) Other than monitoring HTTP and MYSQL via Nagios, you could always write a Nagios plugin that would bring up the RT login page and login with a real username and password. If that is successful, then you consider RT to be up. If the login attempt generates errors or times out, then you can assume that RT is 'down' and Nagios generates an alert. The (sort of) problem I have is that there are sysadmins, and they use RT as end users (internally) but when I asked them how they wanted to set up monitoring the system (if necessary to wake them up when it needs restarting, or just TLC) I got a sort of meh answer, rather than what I was hoping for. (I wanted We do monitoring like this round here so that there would then be an obvious way to extend that to RT) Hence the slightly daftly phrased question - I was hoping that a good solution already exists that they'd then agree to quickly. Nicholas Clark ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
On Jul 23, 2007, at 7:17 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote: Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database If #1 is true, then, #2 is true as well. (You need to get to the db to check the user.) So just a simple scripted login test will do you. Or a GET of a page with user and pass passed in as parameters. PGP.sig Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT
If that's all that's required, then the check_http plug-in provided by Nagios will do the trick. There's an option to check the html for the presence of a text specific string (maybe Search/Results.rdf - you'll only get this string after successfully logging in). Saves you the trouble of writing your own monitoring script, but only if you are already using Nagios. -Khai On Jul 23, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Jesse Vincent wrote: On Jul 23, 2007, at 7:17 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote: Nicholas Clark wrote: We're going to make the RT self-service interface visible to our external clients. We'd like to monitor it, so that we know if it's down? What's the best way to monitor RT? Are there any built in pages that would let us quickly tell that (say) 1: users can log in 2: the RT web application has a live connection to a working database If #1 is true, then, #2 is true as well. (You need to get to the db to check the user.) So just a simple scripted login test will do you. Or a GET of a page with user and pass passed in as parameters. ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com