[Xymon] Any way to do http tests with HEAD request?

[J.C. Cleaver]

On Thu, April 16, 2015 6:00 pm, Andrew Rakowski wrote:
> Hi jc,
>
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2015, J.C. Cleaver wrote:
>
>> Thinking about it, this might be something that's not too difficult to
>> add
>> into xymonnet either. A HEAD is basically just a GET from the poller's
>> perspective, and any evaluation on body contents (or lack thereof) is
>> semantically identical to the configuration options available now.
>>
>> An open question is what the best way to indicate that this is a
>> "HEAD-only" test would be.
>>
>> It could be something applied to the entire host line (like browser=),
>> made into a separate column (similar to httpstatus= or post=, except
>> without the... POST), or another per-URL protocol specifier similar to
>> how
>> the TLS/SSL configuration is handled.
>
> Unless there's significant savings in overhead one way over the other, I
> see no problem with doing it whichever way is simplest to implement.
>
> From my point of view, if I'm testing multiple URLs on the same server, it
> would typically be for different applications, and I'd probably make a
> separate host line for each app (so I could have different notifications
> to the app maintainer.)  If the web server itself is failing, then I'd see
> the problem across multiple app URLs and know the problem was with the web
> server itself.
>
> However, if per URL is easier, that would work just as well.
>
> For the time being, I guess I'll just have to make a special case external
> script to test using curl (and try to convince the developers that they
> should always have a 'test' URL that doesn't take large amounts of
> processing just to verify things are working...)
>
> -Andrew
>


Hi Andrew,


HEAD support using the syntax
"httphead[=COL];http://www.example.com/blah/" has been added in, and
should be available in the next release.


HTH,

-jc