Re: [rt-users] monitoring RT

2007-07-25 Thread Mikko Lipasti

- 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

2007-07-24 Thread Tom Lanyon
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

2007-07-23 Thread Nicholas Clark
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

2007-07-23 Thread Drew Barnes
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

2007-07-23 Thread Drew Barnes
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

2007-07-23 Thread David Svejda
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

2007-07-23 Thread James Moseley
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

2007-07-23 Thread Nicholas Clark
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

2007-07-23 Thread Jay Lee

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

2007-07-23 Thread Ham MI-ID, Torsten Brumm
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

2007-07-23 Thread Jesse Vincent


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

2007-07-23 Thread Khai Lam
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