1.Make sure you are the zenoss user.

Test the plugin from the command line. Once its working we will integrate it with Zenoss. check_http -h will display all plugin options. Here is the command to test the product directory.

$ZENHOME/libexec/check_http -H www.zenoss.com

If the check_http command is correct, the output will look similar to the following.

HTTP OK HTTP/1.0 200 OK - 0.723 second response time |time=0.722758s;;;0.000000 size=7932B;;;0

You can see that this command plugin returns a valid value we are ready for the next step.

Add the device you want to check (one running a www. website) to the Zenoss system setting the discovery protocol to 'none'.

Navigate to the device in the Zenoss system and use the page menu to select More and then Templates.

Click Create Local Copy button.

You have now overridden the default Device template with one specific to this device.

Drill into the template and remove the sysUpTime data source since we won’t be using SNMP for this device.

Add a new description to the template something like “Web testing template”.

Add a new Data Source called rootWebCheck.

Drill into rootWebCheck and set the following variables:

Debug your ZenCommand by running zencommand in the foreground with debugging on.

zencommand run -d www.website.com -v10

Where www.website.com is the site you are trying to monitor.

The command template field is a TALES expression so we can do some substitution in our command that will make it generic for any device we add to this class. First let’s set the -H flag to be the IP of the device against which this command will be run.

check_http -H ${here/manageIp}

Now let’s add a check looking for content on the page. The -r flag will run a regular expression against the web page to check for text. We will look for three pieces of text:

check_http -H ${here/manageIp}-r textstring1

Where textsrting1 is some text you know to be displayed on the resulting webpage.

For this example, you want this command to be generic, so make a custom field for the regex that can be changed per device. Set the default to “.*” which will match everything. Go to /Devices/Custom Schema and add a new field:

Now go back our template and change the command to be.

check_http -H ${here/manageIp}-r ${here/cWebMatchRegex}

Now add the regex value into cWebMatchRegex that we used in the example above.

Test your ZenCommand from the command line.