Adding a Monitor for Basic Websites or Cloud Services

Last updated on 2023-02-17 10:52:53

You can monitor cloud services that include JavaScript redirection or require credentials.

A cloud service monitor includes credential information and then tests the health of the cloud service. It can handle anything a browser can handle.

Use cloud service monitors to monitor the availability and response times of

Cloud services (for example, Microsoft Office 365 or Google Docs).
Customer site intranet websites (for example, a SharePoint portal).
External facing private websites (for example, Outlook Web Access pages).
The primary website for the customer.

You can configure alerts based on the availability or response times of cloud services, as well as the actual content of the page, which allows for monitoring for error messages returned by web services. The page content may be static HTML pages or dynamic page content generated using Microsoft ASP.NET, PHP, or Cold Fusion.

The monitoring framework for cloud services uses .cloud files, based on our core policy-based monitoring framework. These files enable the monitoring and management of cloud services that use JavaScript redirects or require session credentials.

Notes

Each site can have only one cloud service monitor.
Onsite Manager must be able to reach the website or cloud service
Sites without Onsite Manager cannot monitor cloud services. Device Managers cannot monitor cloud services.
Alert rules for cloud services are based on response time.
The Onsite Manager executes one cloud service monitor at a time. It can take a few minutes to return the results of the monitor. If you have several cloud service monitors, they will queue and execute serially.
The cloud service monitor does not use the proxy server configuration of the Onsite Manager but uses the browser settings instead. You must manually change the proxy settings in the browser for the Barracuda RMM Service Account user profile.
During a polling interval, requests for other cloud services monitors are queued and are completed once the active connection is released. To avoid issues with inconsistent polling intervals, stagger your cloud services monitoring whenever possible.

Cloud Service monitors can be added to websites individually and not added to monitoring policies.

To add a Cloud Service Monitor

In Service Center, click Configuration > Alerting > Monitor & Alert Rules.
Click the Cloud Service icon.
From the Site list, select the site that contains the Onsite Manager that will be doing the monitoring.
Click Add Monitor.
From the Choose Monitor Type list, select Cloud Service.
Click Add Monitor.
In the Monitor tab, type a title for the monitor.
Optionally, type a description for the monitor.
Do one of the following:
- From the Cloud Service list, select one of the cloud service options (for example, Office 365).
- Click Import Other Cloud Service. Browse to locate the .cloud file, provide a name to use in the Cloud Service drop-down list, and provide a description. Then click Save.
After you import a .cloud file, you cannot delete it from the Cloud Service list. You can, however, stop using it by deleting the Cloud Service monitor and using a different one.
Enter the User Name and Password information.
Use a dedicated Cloud Service account for monitoring purposes only. You should use a dedicated account so that personal email or work email is not being monitored and to have better transaction times (for example, the monitor is not waiting for the page to load emails).
In the Text to Find box, type the string that should exist on the page to indicate the cloud service is running.
For reference, the URLs used by the cloud services are as follows:
- Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/
- Office 365: https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf
Log in to the account and then locate a string to use. Recommended defaults for each cloud service are as follows:
- For Google Docs, type My Collections.
- For Office 365, type My Profile.
The search parameter is not case-sensitive.

The text you choose may be affected by custom settings of the cloud service user account. For example, the account may be set to default to a different page on login. If in doubt, log into the cloud service user account manually to determine an appropriate search string.
Click Test Cloud Service to ensure what you entered works.
From the Polling Interval list, select an appropriate time to set how frequently the data is captured.
Do one of the following to set when the monitor runs:
- To set the monitor to run all the time, do nothing.
- To change when the monitor runs, click Run Always to open the Select Interval dialog box and select either the Daily Interval or Specific Interval option button and use the corresponding lists to define the monitoring. Click OK.