Infrastructure Monitoring Made Easy
In our effort to expand the coverage of notification technologies, Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce the release of Apache ActiveMQ notification plugin. It was successfully tested with an Amazon AWS broker.
Zenith Elevate extends special thanks to Amazon for making its ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ services available for free.
As we strive to make MAGNAPing the IT infrastructure monitoring solution of choice for our customers, we build on our tradition of making it the most powerful, flexible, and user-friendly system on the market. Today, Zenith Elevate is happy to announce the availability of two new features that make MAGNAPing even more powerful and flexible.
User exits are events that fire during the ping process and allow the user to hook their own, custom handlers up. A total of eight events are available right now:
Each event can invoke a user’s program and pass to it the URL currently being processed, the user name associated with the URL, and some tokens. The standard token substitution is applied. Please see the administrator’s manual for more information.
The program can be a command-line application, a script, or a .NET assembly. Both Full Framework and Standard assemblies are supported.
This latest feature’s possible use cases can be custom logging or any additional processing not currently supported by MAGNAPing.
A light-weight HTTP server is now included with MAGNAPing. It outsources all HTTP processing or HTTPS encryption to the operating system and focuses on query processing. The server operates in two modes: visual and service.
In the visual mode, the server presents an HTML document that is fully customizable and skinnable by the user. Again, the standard token substitution applies. By viewing the document through a browser, the user can quickly remotely check the instance status, without having to log into the host that is running the MAGNAPing instance or to run SQL queries or reports.
In the service mode, the server acts as a RESTful endpoint for integration into 3d-party monitoring applications or dashboards. It returns individual token values, in a number of formats specified on the query string:
This latest feature allows for low-effort integration of MAGNAPing instances into your exiting central monitoring solutions. It also provides the operations staff peace of mind because we all realize that notification delivery is prone to 3d-party issues, and the lack of failure notifications is not proof of business as usual.
In the latest release, MAGNAPing received a new optional feature, which simplifies its administration: the remote monitoring. The user can now enter the address of a host, which runs MAGNAPing, in a browser, and see the status of the instance and the lists of URLs that are being monitored and those that failed.
The monitoring dashboard is a regular HTML file, which can be customized and themed/skinned by the user. Each substitution variable/token in the HTML element belongs to its own class, for styling through CSS.
The built-in HTTP server can be turned off, to conserve resources.
Windows impersonation is now implemented. Users who are only interested in monitoring some aspects of their Windows hosts no longer have to run MAGNAPing under a certain user account. With impersonation, it can run under any account but temporarily impersonate another account, for the duration of the monitoring ping. This improves security and allows MAGNAPing to run in highly-secure environments.
Notification is important, but reporting is important too. Since MAGNAPing works with many DB back-ends its reporting module requires quite a bit of work, which is underway. Soon, a dashboard will be included with MAGNAPing, as a free add-on.
We are also working on callbacks also known as user exits. A number of callback points will be offered, such as before and after a ping, before and after flagging a resource as failed or restored, and some others.
Stay tuned for more exciting news of new features that make MAGNAPing ever more powerful and flexible!