Website Monitoring: Why am I getting "ERROR Unable to determine authentication type" after configuring an input?

[kpavan]

Hi All,

I was looking for website monitoring found this app https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1493/ . After installation initial setup was done, since I didn't have any proxy, just saved as it is. After that I did configure an input for Website Monitoring, but started getting the error below. Not sure how to fix it since I am a newbie for this app. Please help me withthis issue.

2016-07-07 04:53:04,388 ERROR Unable to determine authentication type
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/data/splunk/etc/apps/website_monitoring/bin/web_ping.py", line 147, in determine_auth_type
    auth_header = http.headers['WWW-Authenticate']
  File "/data/splunk/etc/apps/website_monitoring/bin/website_monitoring_app/requests/structures.py", line 54, in __getitem__
    return self._store[key.lower()][1]
KeyError: 'www-authenticate'

Thanks!
Pavan

[LukeMurphey]

Its a bug. I opened a ticket and will fix this (see bug ticket 1391). I'm planning on fixing this in version 1.5.1 very soon.

Update:
I just released version 1.5.1 which includes a fix for this.

[jafars]

I get the same issue and I'm on 1.6.1.

2016-09-05 16:30:26,973 INFO Authentication type could not be automatically discovered; auth_type=basic
2016-09-05 16:30:26,973 ERROR Unable to determine authentication type (no www-authenticate header); will default to basic authentication
None

Any suggestions?

[LukeMurphey]

@jafars: the input tries to automatically discover what type of authentication the web-server requires (HTTP basic, HTTP digest, or NTLM). That message indicates that the web-server doesn't provide any clue as to what authentication type is supported. The input thus defaults to HTTP basic. That message can be safely ignored if authentication is working for you.

[Spranta]

Hi Luke,
we are getting this error while monitoring our SAP Enterprise Portal Websites...
Unknown type of authentication requested

Do you have an idea?
Thanks
Alex

[Spranta]

Btw, your App is awesome!

[kpavan]

@LukeMurphey,

Today I have upgraded app to 2.4 and am getting error for one of my URL like authentication type error.
Could you please help me to fix this issue?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2017-07-19 12:36:38,704 ERROR Unable to determine authentication type
Traceback (most recent call last):
... 10 lines omitted ...
File "/data/splunk/etc/apps/website_monitoring/bin/website_monitoring_app/requests/adapters.py", line 503, in send
raise ConnectionError(e, request=request)

Thanks!
Pavan

[LukeMurphey]

@kpavan: can you start a new question? Your issue sounds different than the one in this question.

[kpavan]

Thanks for your reply.

One more thing to ask, can we monitor URL sequence from this app?

Thanks!

[LukeMurphey]

What do you mean by a URL sequence?

[kpavan]

Sorry for the delay in response.

In short, there will be username & password for given URL for which we need to monitor the url, post login we need match some action, like
step.1 go to https://mail.google.com
step.2 login with username and possword
step.3 match Inbox, if available then URL is working well and fine.

There is tool called HP SiteScope which does this, just want to know is this can be done from this app? not sure how to achieve from splunk/app.

Below is the description for sequence monitoring.
"The purpose of URL Sequence is to monitor multiple web pages of an online application. It checks pages with dynamically generated information, enhancing interactive transactions such as logging into a login page, creating an account using a web form, instructing the application to perform some action, etc.

URL Sequencing starts with a specific URL such as the Login page and then followed by additional links/URL in it. The URL Sequence monitoring thus performs end-to-end verification of particular transactions.

This feature comes handy especially for e-commerce sites and sites that provides multiple forms to be filled-in by users. You can perform URL sequence monitoring to see what is returned at every step of a URL sequence. This helps in quicker troubleshooting by identifying which page in the sequence, that is typically followed by users, gives trouble."

[LukeMurphey]

Ah, that makes sense. The app doesn't support this at the current time. However, I created a ticket to look into adding this: http://lukemurphey.net/issues/1395

[LukeMurphey]

FYI: I added forms authentication to the Website Input app. That app is more for extracting information that monitoring for outages but it could be used for determining if the site is up too (since no matches would mean something was wrong).