Adding HTTP information to your end to end view

In earlier posts I've written about how you can use OMEGAMON XE For Mainframe Networks to add network level information to your mainframe monitoring views. For example, you can monitor network traffic to/from CICS, IMS, or DB2, and look at such things as byte counts, round trip time, round trip variance, and network excpetions. This type of information can be a useful supplement to host response time captured by OMEGAMON XE for CICS or IMS.

Another interesting set of metrics you can add to the mix is HTTP monitoring. Many applications in most enterprises have a flow that may start with some form of user interaction at an HTTP server. That HTTP server will often interfface with some form of middleware (MQ, WebSphere, J2EE, you name it), and then to either CICS, IMS, DB2 on z/OS or all of the above. To have a more complete monitoring picture, it's nice to have HTTP information as part of the monitoring view.

Depending upon which Tivoli monitoring components you have licensed, you may have access to a tool called the Universal Agent (UA). UA is an interesting tool in that you can use it to pull in information from a wide variety of data sources. Among the data providers is file, socket, SNMP, and HTTP. The HTTP data provider allows you to monitor URLs, and track the status and response time of these URLs on an ongoing basis in the Tivoli Portal. UA is a great tool to add the additional layer of performance/availability data to the Portal.

Here's how you can add the information to your portal view. First you need to enable the HTTP data provider as an option in UA. To do that you go to Manage Tivoli Services and select the option to configure or reconfigure UA. When you click through that dialog you will get to a notepad editor pop-up. There you add HTTP to the start-up options (as I show in the example). You save the file, and re-cycle the UA process. The next step is to add a URL to be monitored. From the navigation tree in the portal, you select a Take Action, and select Add URL (again as I show in the example). You enter a URL to monitor in the pop-up, click OK and you are ready to go.

The data you get is interesting, and useful. For each monitored URL you will get a status, and a response time, along with page size and other information. Good stuff to add your portal views.