Mouse in the House

Posted by pieter on April 20th, 2011

Not many people seem to know about this, but our alerting systems can in fact be set up to call any URL in the escalation chain. Doesn’t that sound cool? (If not, then please read the sentence again until it does!) OK, so now that we agree it’s cool, I think this feature can use some promotion, as I’ve checked the numbers and discovered that only 0.1% of our customers are currently using it.

As Simone already wrote in her opening post, you can configure your monitors to escalate a problem to different people inside your company via email, SMS, Jabber/XMPP, …, or more publicly via RSS or even Twitter. But what if you don’t want someone to be alerted, but something, like an internal system or machine, instead? This is what an action URL’s can be used for: They notify another remote system about the alert via the HTTP protocol.

To set one up, click on the “Contacts” tab in either the “Monitoring” or “Reporting” dashboards. Press “new contact” and select the contact type “action” from the first drop down:

Then provide the Action URL that you want our systems to touch in case this alert is triggered, and finally click “save”. The Action URL has now been set up, and it can be used as any other normal contact in the rest of our systems. For example, it could be used as the initial element in an escalation group, to trigger an advanced warning. Technically, our systems will issue an HTTP POST request to the URL you provide, with the (customised) parametrised alert text sent as the form-urlencoded request body, in UTF-8, for example:

monitor=Monitor1&host=www.mycompany.com&type=browser&since=2011-04-19+17:00

By reading the request body on the server side, the alert can be interpreted and acted upon.

As always, we recommend you have different types of contacts in an alerting group, to ensure that important alerts will reach you even when the action URL itself is down.

Enjoy! And do let us know what you are using action URL’s for…

Pieter Ennes
VP Engineering
WatchMouse

Pieter is too modest to write his own biography so I (Simone Maier) am writing it for him…Pieter is a physicist who’s jumped ship and become WatchMouse’s VP of Engineering. As the linchpin of our company, he manages our technical and development teams. In addition to being modest, he’s also one of the smartest guys we know. (Don’t bother queuing ladies, he’s already got a lovely girlfriend).

‘WatchMouse Weekly’ tweets and corresponding blog posts aims to be an introduction with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WatchMouse monitoring. For all ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ blog posts go here.

Posted by simone on February 22nd, 2011

Our new ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ tweets and corresponding blog posts aims to be an introduction with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WatchMouse monitoring. Written predominantly by our architects and coders, ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ will provide suggestions about functions you might not otherwise find.

We’ll let you know who’s produced each post so that you can start to know the expertise and personalities that make up the WatchMouse team. So, to the first tip…

An alert escalation hierarchy can be set up in the “contacts” tab, under your “monitoring” dashboard, after creating a contacts group. Corresponding to the number of detected errors, your escalation hierarchy can issue alerts to a range of contacts. For example, initial alerts could be sent to your webmaster. Following the continuous identification of the same error, further alerts could be issued to IT managers and eventually after many consecutive errors, an alert could be sent to your CTO. Your monitors can also be set to only alert your daytime staff during their working hours. If errors are detected outside standard working hours, alerts can be sent to your on-call staff.

In addition, the “expert mode” link (available in the “monitors” tab, under your “settings” menu) allows you to set up maintenance schedules, limit monitoring to certain times/days and customize your monitor to alert different contacts.  For full instructions refer to: http://www.watchmouse.com/howto/Getting-Started-with-WatchMouse-Performance-Monitoring.html

Post by Simone Maier. I’m the Product Marketing Manager at WatchMouse. I found WatchMouse while working at a domain registrar; attracted by the clever and flexible approach of Mark (CTO) and Stan (CEO), I joined in 2007. I help write many of WatchMouse’s guides and marketing communications, support our Resellers and our sales activities. I’m based out of the TechHub in London.