Probes

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Probes are the heart of the monitoring requests. Probes are arrays of request objects defined in the config file monika.yml like so.

1 probes:
2   - id: '1'
3     name: Name of the probe
4     description: Probe to check GET time
5     interval: 10
6     requests:
7       - {}
8     alerts: []
9   - id: '2'
10     name: Name of the probe 2
11     description: Probe to check GET health
12     interval: 10
13     requests:
14       - {}
15     alerts: []

Monika goes through each probe object, sends it out, and determines whether an alert or notification need to be sent out.

Probe Request Anatomy

An actual probe request may be something like below.

1 probes: [
2     id: '1'
3     name: 'Example: get Time'
4     description: Probe
5     interval: 10
6     requests:
7     - method: POST
8       url: https://mybackend.org/user/login
9       timeout: 7000
10       saveBody: true
11       headers:
12         Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiIxMjM0NTY3ODkwIiwibmFtZSI6IkhlbGxvIGZyb20gSHlwZXJqdW1wIiwiaWF0IjoxNTE2MjM5MDIyfQ.T2SbP1G39CMD4MMfkOZYGFgNIQgNkyi0sPdiFi_DfVA
13       body:
14         username: someusername
15         password: somepassword
16       alerts: ARRAY-HERE
17     incidentThreshold: 3
18     recoveryThreshold: 3
19     alerts:
20     - query: response.status != 200
21       message: HTTP response status is {{ response.status }}, expecting 200
22   ]

Details of the field are give in the table below.

Topic	Description
method	Http method such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
url	This is the url endpoint to dispatch the request to
timeout	Request timeout, after which time, `Monika`will assume timeout
headers	Your http header
body	Any http body if your method requires it
interval (optional)	Number of probe's interval (in seconds). Default value is 10 seconds.
incidentThreshold (optional)	Number of times an alert should return true before Monika sends notifications. For example, when incidentThreshold is 3, Monika will only send notifications when the probed URL returns non-2xx status 3 times in a row. After sending the notifications, Monika will not send notifications anymore until the alert status changes. Default value is 5.
recoveryThreshold (optional)	Number of times an alert should return false before Monika sends notifications. For example, when recoveryThreshold is 3, Monika will only send notifications when the probed URL returns status 2xx 3 times in a row. After sending the notifications, Monika will not send notifications anymore until the alert status changes. Default value is 5.
alerts	The condition which will trigger an alert, and the subsequent notification method to send out the alert. See below for further details on alerts and notifications.
saveBody (optional)	When set to true, the response body of the request is stored in the internal database. The default is off when not defined. This is to keep the log files size small as some responses can be sizeable. The setting is for each probe request.
alerts (optional)	See alerts section for detailed information

Probe Response Anatomy

The default shape of a response when Monika has successfully fetched a request is as the following.

1 status: 200
2 statusText: OK
3 headers:
4   test-header: ...
5 config:
6   url: https://reqres.in/api/users
7   method: GET
8   data:
9     mydata: value
10   headers:
11     Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*
12     User-Agent: axios/0.21.1
13 data: ...

Details of the fields are shown in the table below.

Topic	Description
status	HTTP Status Code (e.g 200, 403, 500)
statusText	HTTP Status Code Explanation (e.g OK, Forbidden, Internal Server Error)
config	Request configuration (e.g URL, Method, Data, Headers, Body, etc.)
headers	Response headers from the fetched request (e.g SetCookie, ETag, etc.).
data	Response payload from the fetched request (e.g token, results, data).

Probe response data could be used for Request Chaining.

Execution order

In a configuration with multiple probes, Monika will perform the requests in sequence in the order that they are entered, one after another. When the --id flag is used, the sequence of IDs are executed as entered.

On completion, Monika will sleep until the next interval to start again. At the top of the monika.yml file there is an interval setting. The execution will be restarted after every interval. If interval is shorter than the amount of time to dispatch all the requests, then Monika will immediately repeat after the last probe response and any notification alerts sent. When the --repeat flag is set with a value, Monika will not run indefinitely, instead, it will stop after executing the probes as many times as specified.

Content-Type header

Currently, Monika only supports Content-Type value application/x-www-form-urlencoded and application/json with UTF-8 encoding.

Request Body

By default, request body will be treated as-is. If request header's Content-Type is set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, it will be serialized into URL-safe string in UTF-8 encoding.

Postman JSON file support

To run monika using a Postman JSON file, use --postman flag as follows:

 monika --postman <path_to_postman_file>

Insomnia file support

Monika supports Insomnia collection file in version 4 format. Both json and yaml files are supported. To run Monika using an Insomnia collection file, use --insomnia flag as follows:

 monika --insomnia <path_to_insomnia_file>

HAR file support

HAR HTTP-Archive format was created by the Web Performance Working Group and has become the standard in browser archive request data definition. To run monika using a HAR file, use --har flag as follows:

 monika --har <path_to_HAR_file>