Default Parameters for vCloudHttpTest

This test emulates a user accessing the vCloud Director Cell via HTTP(S), and reports whether the vCloud Director Cell is accessible or not. In the process, the test indicates the availability of the vCloud Director Cell over the web, and the time it took for the agent to access it. This way, issues in webbased access to the Cell come to light.

This page depicts the default parameters that need to be configured for the vCloudHttpTest.

• The TEST PERIOD list box helps the user to decide how often this test needs to be executed.

• The web page being accessed. This URL should be of the format URL name:URL value. URL name is a unique name assigned to the URL, and the URL value is the value of the URL. By default, the URL parameter is set to HomePage:https://<IP_address_of_managed_vCloudDirectorCell:443/>, where HomePage is the URL name, and https://<IP_address_of_managed_vCloudDirectorCell:443/> is the URL value. If required, you can even configure multiple URLs – one each for every web page that the test should attempt to access. If each URL configured requires special permissions for logging in, then, you need to configure the test with separate credentials for logging into every URL. Likewise, you need to provide instructions to the test on how to validate the content returned by every URL, and also set an encoding format for each URL. To enable administrators to easily configure the above per URL, eG Enterprise provides a special interface. To access this interface, click on the encircled ‘+’ button alongside the URL text box in the test configuration page. To know how to use this special interface, refer to Configuring Multiple URLs for Monitoring document.

• Confirm whether any cookies being returned by the web server need to be saved locally and returned with subsequent requests using the COOKIEFILE flag.

• In the PROXYHOST text box, specify the host on which a web proxy server is running (in case a proxy server is to be used).

• Specify the port number on which the web proxy server is listening, in the PROXYPORT text box.

• Enter the user name of the proxy server in the PROXYUSERNAME text box.

• Specify the password of the proxy server in the PROXYPASSWORD text box.

• Confirm the PASSWORD by retyping it in the CONFIRM PASSWORD text box.

• In the TIMEOUT text box, specify the maximum duration (in seconds) for which the test will wait for a response from the server. The default TIMEOUT period is 30 seconds.

• DNS lookups can cause significant delays in rendering a webpage. To avoid such delays, administrators may want to know how long the DNS server takes to respond to the requests. To help administrators in this regard, this test reports the DNS response time measure when the REPORT DNS TIME flag is set to Yes. By default, this flag is set to No indicating that this test will not report the DNS response time measure by default.

• Once the necessary values have been provided, clicking on the UPDATE button will register the changes made.

When changing default configurations of tests, the values with “$” indicate variables that will be replaced by the eG system according to the specific server being managed - for instance, $hostName is the host/nickname of the target host, $port is the port number of the server being monitored. E.g., for a server xyz:80, $hostName will be changed automatically by the eG manager to “xyz” and $port will be changed to “80” when configuring a test.