Limiting download size on web check

[balou]

Hello zabbix users / folks !

I am monitoring a couple of servers via web-check on a fairly regular basis. meaning every 1-3 minutes depending on how critical the server is.

Now, we need to monitor the first page of the website which is .. quite big ~ 500KB -- don't ask I didn't built it

In practice it means one thing (say for minute based check) :
- 1440 checks daily - 43200 monthly
- 0.5MB downloaded PER check
Total: up to 20GB of data transfered for a simple monitoring where in practice I only care about the return code.

Is there a way to donwload only the first 10K / 50K of a page in order to avoid that waste of bandwidth ?

Any help / insight is appreciated.

Regards,

Balou

[richlv]

as far as i know, zabbix web monitoring retrieves page body only, included elements like large, ugly images and large, stupid flash elements are not retrieved.
now if page body of that website is 500k...

[balou]

Richvl,

Thanks for your feedback, this is a bit what I was afraid of.

Indeed this is the problem... This is a listing website and the first page is bloated with text and html. Sadly I can't do much about the content.

Several options appear :
- either go for a custom check and define the download limitation myself -- I'd like to avoid that as much as possible and use zabbix built-in function as much as possible
- go for an alternate page -- problem is, it won't be the landing page and if their template is screwed up I won't see it or won't get the error code (already had some weird behavior of sub-page working but the main page giving out a error 504 with nginx)
- go for ... a beer instead .. maybe it can clear ones mind

I need to see what to do.. I guess I'll go for a new custom check instead that will retrieve the first few bytes and wait for the return code - as mentioned already this is currently the only thing that matters here.

Any experience with it ?

Best,

Balou

[richlv]

it sounds like what you want is ability set CURLOPT_NOBODY option.
i'd imagine it might be as simple as a single checkbox for http step item - and it seems like a valid feature request to me. could you file it on the tracker ?
thanks.

[balou]

Indeed that would do the trick !

I'll file in on the tracker right away.

Thanks

[balou]

Ok, tracker has been submited :

https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-76

Best,

Vincent

[thirellouma]

as far as i know, zabbix web monitoring retrieves page body only, included elements like large, ugly images and large, stupid flash elements are not retrieved.
now if page body of that website is 500k...

I wonder where is zabbix store this "page body"? Could anyone told me plz?

[hostcc]

Patches submitted

Implemented web tests using HEAD HTTP method, see http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21739 and ZBXNEXT-763 for details.

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Ilia Sotnikov