You create a service monitor to define health check parameters for a particular type of network traffic. When you associate a service monitor with a pool, the pool members are monitored according to the service monitor parameters, so in simpler terms a Service Monitor is just a health check that is monitoring server state and will stop client requests being sent to a server that has failed.
Service Monitors once configured are added to a Pool containing servers to monitor.
The options in NSX for Service Monitors are:
Name: Administrative name for the new Service Monitor
Interval: How often the monitor will poll the server in seconds
Timeout: The maximum time for the response to be received in seconds
Max Retries: The number of times to recheck before deeming the server offline
Type:
- HTTP/HTTPS: Can configure a GET or POST and text to send and expected to receive
- TCP/UDP: Can configure ports, text to send and expected to receive
- ICMP: Basic pings
If you define the Service Monitor as HTTP or HTTPS you will also need to populate the Expected, Method and URL fields.
- Expected: The string the monitor expects to match in the response e.g. HTTP/1.1
- Method: GET, Options or POST
- URL: The URL to send in the request
Send: The data to send to the server
Receive: The string to be matched to the response.