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).
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