Website monitoring has always been an essential part of IT monitoring, and today it is much more complex than in the early years of the Internet. Twenty years ago, a simple ping was often enough to check whether a site was online or not. Today, aspects such as load balancers, encrypted transport paths, and different HTTP versions play a role. For more than 20 years, monitoring systems have relied on the check_http tool that originated in the Nagios universe. However, this reliable little helper is now showing its age. With check_httpv2 [1], Checkmk now offers a new open source implementation for modern IT environments (see the “About Checkmk” box).
In this article, I show you how to monitor modern websites in detail, including all details of encryption, authentication, complex connection setups,…