In this chapter, we learned to monitor web pages based on various parameters, including response time, transfer speed, HTTP return code, and text contained in the page itself. We also learned how to set up multiple scenarios, and steps as well as setting up variables to be used in those steps. As a more advanced example, we logged in to the Zabbix frontend and logged out of it. For that to work, we extracted the session ID and reused it in subsequent steps. With this knowledge, it should be possible to monitor most of the functionality web pages have.

For production systems, there will usually be way more applications, scenarios, and steps. Web monitoring can be used for many different purposes, the most popular being site availability and performance, but there are many different cases you could monitor, including things such as watching the slashdot front page for a company name and replacing the usual first web page with a simpler one to withstand the coming load-slashdotting-easier.

As a simpler alternative, we explored web page items on the agent side. They have three features:

• Retrieving full page contents
• Finding out page load times
• Extracting a string from a page using regular expressions

Web scenarios are only available on the server side, while simpler items are only available on the agent side.

Having mostly concentrated on monitoring the Linux system so far, we'll leave that here and look at monitoring Windows in the next chapter. We'll look at the native agent for Windows, performance counter and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) monitoring, and service discovery and Windows Event Log monitoring.