Application dependent healthcheck

One way we used to this was to create a single page on the web-server that returned a string based on the app server's health. As we were a J2EE shop, this was usually a JSP page dropped somewhere in the app that performed a complete atomic transaction (hit the app, pull a single row from the DB, display "OK"). Then you make a custom HTTP monitor that hits that page, looks for OK and responds accordingly.

 

 

Another not-so-clean way would be to create a custom monitor for each web server that looks at the app server directly, which assumes that the LTM can see the app servers.