Remedy Best Practices or Experiences

I am not sure either option is viable, let me explain and maybe you can help to confirm or deny the validity of each option.

 

 

Option 1: TCP Monitor

 

With the RPC protocol, some binary data is required in the packet sent to the Remedy server to get a valid response. Also, multiple packets would need to be sent to complete the handshake properly to get a response that is a valid measure of the availability. Is this possible?

 

 

Option 2: External Monitor

 

The Remedy api's available are a C api and a Java api (JNI Wrapper for C native libs). Both require native libraries which are only available for the following platforms: AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. My understanding is that the F5 devices run a BSD kernel, thus would not be capable of using the available Remedy apis.

 

 

Another option I am considering is writing a program to listen on a port seperate that of the application that can handle a request that contains a string. It would simply return a 0 or a 1 if the server is up or down. Can the tcp monitor check a port that is different than the port it handles for load balancing?