Agents Administration - Tests
 

Default Parameters for ApacheNewStatTest

This test reveals critical performance and uptime statistics pertaining to an Apache web server. This test, upon execution, accesses a specific URL on the Apache server, which contains the required metrics. Using this test, administrators can figure out how well the processes are being processed in the server, how many processes are currently idle, the processes that are in KEEPALIVE and Logging state etc. This way, this test helps administrators to identify processing bottlenecks, if any.

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

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

  • By default, the URL to be accessed by this test for extracting the Apache web server's performance statistics will be displayed in the URL text box. The URL is: http://{Apache web server host}:{Apache web server port}/server-status.

  • Whether any cookies being returned by the web server need to be saved locally and returned with subsequent requests is specified in COOKIEFILE textbox.

  • Specify the username and password of the proxy server in the PROXY USERNAME and PROXY PASSWORD text boxes.

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

  • Sometimes the eG agent has to parse the URL content with specific encoding other than the default (ISO-8859-1) encoding. In such a case, specify the type of encoding using which the eG agent can parse the URL content in the Encoding text box. By default, this value is set as none.

  • SSL-enabled web sites are typically secured by a private key, public key, or a publicprivate key pair. If the web page configured for this test is SSL-enabled - i.e., if an HTTPS URL is specified against URL - and the contents of this web page can only be accessed using a private key, then the full path to the private key file will have to be provided against PRIVATEKEY FILE PATH and the password of the private key file should be specified against PRIVATEKEY PASSWORD. If no such private key protects the contents of the configured URL, then set the Privatekey File Path and its Privatekey Password to none.

  • Some web pages (URLs) configured for monitoring may have been designed to allow access for only those requests that have certain specific properties enabled. For instance, web pages of an SSL-enabled web site may have been designed to support TLS v1.3 requests alone. In such a case, you will have to instruct the test to send connection requests to the configured URL over the TLS v1.3 protocol alone; if not, the test will fail. For this, you can use the SYSTEM PROPERTY KEYand SYSTEM PROPERTY VALUE text boxes. Specify the request property that the test needs to look up, in the SYSTEM PROPERTY KEY text box. In the SYSTEM PROPERTY VALUE text box, enter the value this property should be set to, so that the eG agent is allowed access to the configured web page. In the case of the above example, you will have to specify -Dhttps.protocol in the System Property Key text box and TLSv1.3 in the System Property Value text box. You can even provide a comma-separated list of values in the System Property Value text box. For example, if the web page supports multiple versions of the TLS protocol, then the System Property Value specification will be: TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2,TLSv1.3.

  • A user agent is a computer program representing a person - for example, a browser in a Web context. Besides a browser, a user agent could be a bot scraping webpages, a download manager, or another app accessing the Web. Along with each request they make to the server, browsers include a self-identifying User-Agent HTTP header called a user agent (UA) string. This string often identifies the browser, its version number, and its host operating system.

    Some web sites may have been designed to service only those access requests that contain the User Agent (UA) string in the HTTP request header. If this test has been configured with the URL of such a web site/web page, then you have to instruct the test to include the UA string in the header of every connection request it sends to the configured URL; if this is not done, then the test will fail. In this case therefore, set the value of the INCLUDE USERAGENT IN HEADER flag to true. By default, this flag is set to false, indicating that the requests this test emulates do not contain the UA string 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.