Create and configure an HTTP monitor

Latest Dynatrace

You can create synthetic HTTP monitors to check the availability of your resources—websites or API endpoints. HTTP monitors can be run from our global public or private Synthetic locations.

Create a new HTTP monitor

Go to Synthetic Synthetic (new) > Monitor > HTTP.

General

  1. Name this monitor—enter a name (up to 500 characters) for the synthetic monitor. This name should generally describe all the requests in this HTTP monitor.
  2. Select Add tag to apply manually created tags to the monitor. You can choose from auto-complete suggestions as you type or create your own. After the monitor has been created, you can manage tags from the HTTP monitor details page.

Requests

You can configure one or more requests in Visual or Script mode. In Visual mode the settings are shown in couple of groups:

  • Basic configuration (request name and URL)

  • Security (authentication and client certificate—for both of them an existing credential saved in the credential vault can be selected or users can create a new one)

    • In Security section, turn on the Set authentication/authorization toggle to select the Basic, NTLM or Kerberos security method. For more details, see synthetic authentication.

  • SSL certificate (accept any SSL certificate and generate a problem if SSL certificate expires within the next n days)

  • Execution attributes (HTTP method, user agent, additional HTTP headers and advanced attributes: follow redirects, ignore sensitive information, pre-/-post-execution script)

  • Advanced attributes

    • Ignore sensitive information checkbox—expand the Advanced attributes section and select this option to hide potentially sensitive information (contained in, say, the request headers, request body, sometimes URL).

      You need to do this for each request you wish to limit the display of. Request and response bodies, values of request and response headers, and peer certificate details are then replaced by placeholder text.

    This option is automatically turned on for OAuth 2.0 requests and external vault synchronization monitors. Users with access to any credentials contained in the monitor may disable it.

  • Constraints (response status code, response body pattern, response body regex)

  • Performance thresholds alerting (threshold for this request)

In Visual mode, you can also:

  • Select icon and drag it up or down to change the order of requests.
  • Select icon and delete the request.
  • Select icon and duplicate the request.

Frequency and locations

Two factors make up your monitoring schedule—how frequently your browser monitor runs and the number of locations it's executed from.

Dynatrace offers a global network of public Synthetic Monitoring locations out-of-the-box. You can also create private Synthetic locations within your own network infrastructure. Both public and private locations appear on this settings page.

The frequency and number of locations determine the number of monitor executions per hour. For example, running a monitor from 3 locations every 15 minutes results in 12 executions per hour (4 times per hour from each of the 3 locations). Monitor executions are evenly spaced within the selected interval. That is, for a monitor running from 3 locations every 15 minutes, executions are triggered at 5-minute intervals.

You can choose a frequency of every 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes; or 1, 2, or 4 hours. You can also set up your monitor to be executed On demand only. You can select multiple global locations from where your browser monitor is to be executed.

Note that all public Synthetic locations are set to Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. If your monitor script requires the local time or time zone, you can use the api.getContext() method and the system clock to implement conditional logic.

Outage and performance

You can set global and local Outage handling and Performance thresholds for the sum of all requests.

  • Generate a problem and send an alert when this monitor is unavailable at all configured locations (global outage).

    This setting is enabled by default for newly created monitors. It alerts you of global availability outages, that is, when all locations experience a failure simultaneously.

    By default, a global outage problem is generated when all locations fail one time. However, you can specify the number of consecutive failures (from 1 to 5) for a global outage problem, that is, how many times all locations need to fail consecutively in order to generate a global outage problem.

  • Generate a problem and send an alert when this monitor is unavailable for one or more consecutive runs at any location. Local outage problem generation is available only when at least two locations are assigned.

    This allows you to raise a problem when there are consecutive failures at one or more locations. At the environment level, you can choose the number of failures. At the monitor level, you can also determine the number of monitor locations that need to fail in order to generate a local outage problem.

For Performance thresholds, you can turn on:

  • Generate a problem and send an alert on performance threshold violations.

    This setting provides an option to set the Threshold for the sum of all requests (in seconds). If the threshold exceeds the time you provided, you'll be notified.

Summary

See the summary of all the steps and the estimated monthly number of requests.

See HTTP monitors reporting results for monitoring analytics of each monitor.

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