Kaspersky Endpoint Security 10 Terminal Server

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Endpoint Monitoring

I decided to revisit this topic in a bit more depth since it’s important. Endpoint monitoring is essentially a heartbeat ping that checks to see if your site has had a heart attack or not. You can choose an endpoint (url to your web app) and set up a ping from any Azure datacenter in the world. This is helpful because you might want to know if your site is performing poorly in China and not just the continental US or wherever your site is.

These pings can be configured to send out alert emails when the results fall outside of the threshold setting that you choose.

NOTE: The Azure team is changing the portal so quickly right now, which happens to be 4/28/2015, that it’s difficult to keep up with where features are. Often they’re been renamed, moved or conglomerated in with other like features or all three.

To configure endpoint monitoring follow the following steps:

Navigate to the Application Insights blade and choose the site you wish to ping. A blade with your sites name at the top will open with a chart labeled Application Health. This blade contains a number of categorizations of application health to choose from including “Availability Manager” Choose Availability Manager and another blade labeled “Web tests” will fly out to the right.

Click add web test and and you should see this blade where you can configure the ping by choosing the url, the location from which to ping and the http status code expected which will generally be a 200.

You can also have the test send an alert email when a threshold is broken but it seems at this time you cannot specify a custom metric. E.g. you can have a ping monitor response time but can only set the “sensitivity” of low medium or high when asking the web test to send an email.

The end result on the web test blade looks like this:

The take away for this post is mostly that you can have your site pinged from most any part of the planet and send you an email if the response time is poor based on a low medium or high sensitivity. And that it took me about 40 minutes to find where the web tests were relocated to in the Preview Portal. For crying out loud.

Enjoy,

David