WebInject and op5 Monitor for Advanced Web Site Monitoring

One cool thing about developing Open Source software is seeing where people end up using your software. I have seen my WebInject test tool show up in various places for various uses.

The most recent example of this come from op5 AB:

"op5 is a leading product developer of systems and network monitoring and management software. Our aim is to give our customers an increased and measurable availability to the IT system – both in terms of quality and quantity. Our products are op5 Monitor, op5 Statistics and op5 LogServer."

op5 Monitor (Linux Open Source Awards: Best Open Source Application 2006) is their network and application monitoring solution:

"op5 Monitor is a system that monitors the whole network. op5 Monitor is unique in its flexibility and it can monitor all net connected components from servers, routers and printers to individual processors, for example mail services, web servers and virus programmes. All these functions are handled by a web – browser. The system can handle a net with a several thousand units."

Carl Ekman wrote a nice paper explaining how to use WebInject as an intelligent agent/plugin for use in web application monitoring:
WebInject and op5 Monitor - Setting up advanced website monitoring with WebInject (PDF)

The paper serves a nice example and tutorial for using WebInject as a monitoring plugin (It can be used in a similar fashion with Nagios also):

"Most op5 Monitor users have detailed monitoring of all inhouse applications and servers, but sometimes not even that is enough. What if something unforeseen happens that makes dynamically generated content spout jibberish to thousands of visitors without you even knowing about it?

With WebInject you can monitor the actual content of the web pages, and you can perform simulated user actions such as logging in and checking an account balance. If a search string is not present, an error message occurs or a link is broken, you can get an alert with a customized, descriptive message."