URLPlus interest - looking for feedback

I could really have used something like your feature request about 6 years
ago.  Instead I spent a lot of time handcrafting bash scripts to login to
web pages.

Don't get me started on the sites that hit you with 5 different types of
redirects before reaching the front page, or the sites where each input
field is held in it's own personal form. and the submit button executes
javascript to copy the values into form full of hidden fields for the actual
submittal.

Gary, I'll help out where I can, but I'm not very good with perl...

I'm pretty sure you're going to need to break out the url stuff into some
kind of config file and just leave an "urlplus" flag in bb-hosts.

Ralph Mitchell


On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 2:44 AM, Morsiani, Massimo <
user-32025d8bd22e@xymon.invalid> wrote:

 Hi Gary,

nice to hear that you're in the loop again.

 I'm currently using v1.21 ($Id: url-plus.pl,v 1.21 2008/04/30 13:56:07) and
I'm happy with it.

My main reason to use it is:
- per host customizable response time

My feature request is the capability to do something like the following:
1. go to a web page
2. insert username/password to login
3. surf the web site following specific links
4. grab some data from a specific web page
5. check the grabbed data (ie if GRABBED_DATA < MY_THRESHOLD then alert)


Regards.

Massimo Morsiani
Information Technology Dept.
Gilbarco S.r.l.
via de' Cattani, 220/G
50145 Firenze, Italy
tel:    +XX-XXX-XXXXX
fax:    +XX-XXX-XXXXXX
email:  user-32025d8bd22e@xymon.invalid
web:    http://www.gilbarco.it


*From:* Gary Baluha [mailto:user-ae3e15c22de1@xymon.invalid]
*Sent:* mercoledì 29 luglio 2009 18.35
*To:* user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
*Subject:* [hobbit] [Hobbit] URLPlus interest - looking for feedback

For those of you who have been around here for a while, you will have
noticed that I've been somewhat absent of late.  The short story is, I have
changed jobs and just don't get as many opportunities to check in as I used
to.  This also means I have left my reasons for working on URLPlus behind,
which is why development of it has stopped.

The purpose of this post is because I have gotten a few requests from time
to time about URLPlus, and I'm curious what the interest in me getting back
to developing it would be.  I've been out of the loop as far as new features
in the latest version of Hobbit being worked on, but from what I understand,
while there are more web page monitoring features built-in, there are still
some things where URLPlus could be useful.

So, I would be interested in the following feedback:
1) Is there still demand for more robust website content checking features
than what Hobbit supports out of the box?
2) If so, what are the features missing in Hobbit that people are looking
for?
3) For those who have chosen to use URLPlus, what are the reasons for that,
versus using some other Hobbit plugin (or for that matter, some other
monitoring tool)?
4) Finally, for those that are using URLPlus, what additional features
would you like to see it be capable of doing?


-Gary

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