Using the Ping Support Feature

Learn how to ping Network Director and Policy Manager instances to verify they are running.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Akana Ping Support feature includes a simple "ping" web service for testing the functional state of the container's web service framework.

Enabling the Ping Support feature

In many cases, when load balancers are being used to load balance the Network Director instances and/or Policy Manager instances, the load balancers "ping" these instances to verify that the instances are running.

The Ping Support feature provides support for pinging the instances. You can install and enable this feature from the Admin Console of the container instance.

Steps:

Step 1: Install the Ping Support feature into the instance

  1. Launch the Admin Console for the Policy Manager container instance (http://{hostname:{port}/admin/).
  2. On the Available Features page, from the Filter menu, select Feature.
  3. Select Akana Ping Support and click Install Feature.
  4. After the installation is complete, click Close.

Step 2: Enable the Ping Support feature

  1. Select the Configuration tab. In the Configuration Categories section, select com.soa.feature.ping.
  2. Change the value of the ping.service.enabled property from False to True, and then click Apply Changes.

Step 3: Invoke the Ping Service

To invoke the Ping service, use a GET request.

There are two different methods available, with different responses:

  • http://{instance_host}:{instance_port}/pingrest/ping
    • Response: status code 200
    • Body content: true
  • http://{instance_host}:{instance_port}/pingrest/who
    • Response: status code 200
    • Body content: instance container key

Sample Request: /pingrest/ping

C:\>curl -v http://localhost:9101/pingrest/ping
GET /pingrest/ping HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:9101
User-Agent: curl/7.61.0
Accept: */*

Sample Response: /pingrest/ping

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 07:53:32 GMT
Content-Type: application/xml
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
true

Sample Request: /pingrest/who

GET /pingrest/who HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:9905
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0(Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319
Firefox/3.6.16
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Sample Response: /pingrest/who

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:11:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain
Transfer-Encoding: chunked