What is the correct send and receive strings syntax for health monitoring of multiple servers in a pool ?

Your send string should be fine as is. We need to find out what the servers are returning when you issue that GET command. Can you try running a curl from the BIG-IP and seeing what the servers return?

curl poolmemberip/maximo/webclient/login/login.jsp

Replace poolmemberip with whatever the address of your server is.

Thanks for the quick response. Below is the configs:

maximo_prod_vs - virtual server maximo_prod_pool 10.96.150.78:8105 10.96.150.78:8104 10.96.150.78:8103 10.96.150.78:8102 10.96.150.79:8104 10.96.150.79:8103 10.96.150.79:8102 10.96.150.79:8101

I did run the curl for curl -vk http://10.96.150.78:8102/maximo/webclient/login/login.jsp and below is the some of response:

Accept: / HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Is the monitor not marking any of the pool members up? The way it's currently written, it's going to look for the string "Maximo" anywhere within the server's response. If it's not marking any of the pool members up, then it's not finding that string.

If you change the receive string to "200 OK", that should mark the pool members as up. But the receive string really needs to be something indicative of the health of the server.

There is a string, Maximo in the response from the server but the F5 seems to still mark the servers down. If I replace the receive string with OK or Maximo|OK it works. Using 200 OK does not work.

The most important question that I need answer to is what is the most efficient way to monitor all the servers in the same pool considering that they all listening on different ports ? Do I need multiple monitors ? Can I use the dns name of the the VIP instead of real servers' dns names in the monitor ?

Thanks

The monitor you apply to the pool will attempt to verify the health of each pool member on the port you specified for them. You shouldn't need to use multiple monitors unless you are going to send different strings or expect different responses.

If you sending a monitor over port 80 a receive string of just 200 will work if the server is responding with a http 200 response. If you want to check multiple ports you could use multiple probes but each server will need to pass the health check for each of the probes! That may not work for you. If all the servers listen on port 80 and you can get the same content over port 80 that should work.

Does it mean that the BIGIP ignores the dns name in the send string and just use the nodes ip addresses and ports for the GET request ? Can you provide me with an example of a send and receive strings for our case using the following:

maximo.company.com in the monitor, that gooes a the VIP. Like this one:

GET /maximo/webclient/login/login.jsp HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: maximo.company.com\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n

The string, Maximo is the same for each server in their response.

we use a version of this to check our servers, HEAD /Myserversstatus/health.asp HTTP/1.1\nHost: healthcheck.some.domain.org \nConnection: close\n\n

the servers need to accept requests from the nHost listed in the HEAD

Does that mean the server needs to be configured to respond to request from maximo.company.com ?

So will this below work for us:

Send string HEAD /maximo/webclient/login/login.jsp HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: healthcheck.maximo.company.com\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n

Receive String Maximo