web scenario false positives?

[daveannal]

I am using a web scenario to access an html file and monitoring the status code that is returned. I am frequently seeing what I believe are false positives of "status code: 0" returned in one query and normal "status code: 200" in the next. Update interval in the web scenario is 60 secs.

I would like to set up my triggers such that if I receive a "status code:0" zabbix would test again and if both tests return 0, *then* fire off the notification email.

Is this possible? Is there another way that others have had success with?

Thank you,
-dave

[bashman]

Take a look at steps and timeout, it may help you.

http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...web_monitoring

[daveannal]

Thank you for your reply.

I have increased timeouts for the step but am still seeing the "false positives". The html page that is being downloaded is simply a blank page used for this sort of monitoring so download timeouts aren't due to it being a complex page.

Any other suggestions are appreciated.

Thank you.

[bashman]

When you see in the Latest value of your "Failed step of scenario", status=0, it means that the returned code is 200, otherwise the status would differ from 0.

You could use this trigger expression:

{hostname:web.test.fail[scenario name].min(#3)}#0

It will be triggered when the three latest values are different from 0.

[daveannal]

I think I have resolved my questions on how to work around the false positives that I have been seeing. I haven't resolved why I'm getting the "false positives" and will be digging into that deeper now that I've been able to work around these multiple messages.

- The Status Code = 200 that I am testing against is the return code from apache for downloading the "test.html" file that I am using to determine health of the web servers without having a zabbix agent installed on them. The Status=0 that bashman referred to is if I were testing for the failed step of the scenario. I was close to moving to that change of logic, but figured out my misconfiguration when trying to workaround/mask the multiple emails we were receiving for "false positives".

- when I first started working with zabbix, I thought I needed, in the trigger definition, to set "Event Generation" to "Normal + multiple TRUE events" in order to keep getting emails that the problem was still occurring. This caused issues when I was setting up delayed emails using escalations and I'm not sure why the results were what I was seeing.
-- With Normal + multiple TRUE set and setting up escalations, with period=60seconds, step 1 email to email-1, step 2-0 to email-2, I would see email-1 every minute and email-2 every 4-5 minutes. Setting event generation to only "Normal", escalations worked as expected - 1 email-1, and email-2 from minute 2 until resolution.

- "Normal + multiple TRUE" set might also have been causing issues with trying to test against the last 2 occurances as my results of that testing were not consistent with what I had expected as well. I have not gone back to test this with event generation set to "Normal" but may at a later time.

I am going to continue to dig into why I'm getting the Status Code = 0 messages when trying to download the test.html file, but I've worked through the issue that I wanted to resolve in this thread.

Thank you bashman for your responses.

-dave