I am attempting to use the built-in SOAP monitor on an LTM with 10.2.4. I have made several attempts, but no success yet. Any help or advice would be much appreciated! One of the biggest issues I have is how to I validate that the customer has given me a legitimate POST request and that I'm getting back the result they say I should? They claim to have verified using SOAP-UI, and tell me that this request should work but so far my pool members all fail this monitor. Admittedly, I have very little SOAP knowledge and so I'm having trouble deconstructing the SOAP POST request the customer has provided me, with what I need to put in the fields of the monitor. Can someone help me identify what components of this request need to be included in my SOAP monitor fields and what goes where?

I've never had much luck with the SOAP monitor myself, but it is easy enough to do this with a standard HTTP or HTTPS monitor. A few notes on that though. 1, you have a content-length of 251 but no content. Did they give you anything that should be in the body of the POST(the POST data)? The request as shown above is not valid and will probably throw errors at a minimum because the content-length is off, and may fail because there needs to be data in the body of the post. 2, you have Connection: Keep-Alive but for the purpose of the monitor you probably want Connection: Close That being said, this is how I do my SOAP monitors Send String: POST http://qaesb.nscorp.com/EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\nContent-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\nSOAPAction: \"/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest\"\r\nHost: qaesb.nscorp.com\r\nUser-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\nYour 251 bytes of post body needs to go here\r\n Receive String: Success (or whatever you want to look for in the response indicating success) Lastly, as for validation, it depends if it is http or https. for http you can just telnet to the server on the http port and paste in your send string. If it is https, you will need to use openssl s_client -connect : and then paste in the string. When you do it this way, you need to convert all of the \r\n to a new line, and don't forget the double \r\n\r\n is a double new line(1 new line terminate the line, and then 1 blank line between the header and the body)

and it looks like I left the content-length header out, you just need to squeeze a Content-Length: 251\r\n where you want it.

and my cut and paste was a little happy, the first part, the POST, should be POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\n The hostname should not be in the POST, only the path

Just for clarity, with the above 2 corrections POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\nContent-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\nSOAPAction: \"/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest\"\r\nContent-Length: 251\r\nHost: qaesb.nscorp.com\r\nUser-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\nYour 251 bytes of post body needs to go here\r\n

Thank you for your reply! I will go back and ask about content-length. So if I'm hearing you right, you recommend doing this in an HTTP monitor instead of the built-in SOAP monitor? It is HTTP (vs HTTPS), so it sounds like that should make the validation of the reply easier. Can I put it in a cURL request to validate from the CLI?

Help with SOAP Monitor

31 Replies

Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 07, 2014
'POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\nContent-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\nSOAPAction: \"/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest\"\r\nContent-Length: 244\r\nHost: qaesb.nscorp.com:40020\r\nUser-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n?\r\n\r\n'
mimlo_61970
Cumulonimbus
Oct 07, 2014
After Connection: Close there should be only 2 \r\n\r\n

Then after that you need your post body, the

Your cotent length should be the number of characters in this last body section only, not any of the characters in the header. If you could post that section as text instead of a picture, I should be able to put it all together for you
- mimlo_61970
  Cumulonimbus
  Oct 07, 2014
  nevermind, I see the full post now, give me a minute
- Heidi_35827
  Nimbostratus
  Oct 07, 2014
  Sorry for the confusion, I had a hard time getting it to post the string literally.
mimlo_61970
Cumulonimbus
Oct 07, 2014
put a Tab before your text and it will format it a little better.

Try this. I don't think you can have \r\n in the body, as I believe this signifies the end of the body. I believe you need to use just \n if you really want a newline in the body. I just remove them all for simplicity though, the server won't care about the formatting.

POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\nContent-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\nSOAPAction: \"/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest\"\r\nContent-Length: 239\r\nHost: qaesb.nscorp.com:40020\r\nUser-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n?\r\n

Also note that removing all the newlines shortened the content-length
- mimlo_61970
  Cumulonimbus
  Oct 07, 2014
  ick, it looked fine in the preview, but it got cut off. so ignore my advice on formatting POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\nContent-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8\r\nSOAPAction: \"/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest\"\r\nContent-Length: 239\r\nHost: qaesb.nscorp.com:40020\r\nUser-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n?\r\n
- mimlo_61970
  Cumulonimbus
  Oct 07, 2014
  If that doesn't work, telnet to the port on the server and paste this in to see what response code comes back POST /EAS/CLEDRTest HTTP/1.1 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8 SOAPAction: "/CLEDRTest.serviceagent/CLEDRTestSOAP1/CLEDRTest" Content-Length: 239 Host: qaesb.nscorp.com:40020 User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5) Connection: Close ? After you hit enter on the last line, you should get a response. if you get a response before inputting the last line, something is wrong with the header
- Heidi_35827
  Nimbostratus
  Oct 07, 2014
  Ok, let me try the telnet...I didn't see this suggestion before now...I'll be back
Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 07, 2014
Thank you for your help! Unfortunately I took your string above and pasted into my monitor and I still have the same result....tcpdump shows the reply to the monitor request is a HTTP 500. Do you know how I can share the tcpdumps with you?
Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 07, 2014
' HTTP/1.1 505 HTTP Version Not Supported Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 17:44:39 GMT Connection: close

Connection closed by foreign host.'
- Heidi_35827
  Nimbostratus
  Oct 07, 2014
  That is the response I get from the telnet test.
mimlo_61970
Cumulonimbus
Oct 07, 2014
does that server not support HTTP/1.1? You can try HTTP/1.0. Get rid of the Connection: Close portion of the header

In the packet capture of the example they gave you that works, is it 1.1 or 1.0?
Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 07, 2014
The working request in the tcpdump I have - specifies 1.1 as well. That one successfully returns a 200 OK.

I did just try the same request in telnet, but changed it to 1.0. Oddly enough, I get the same error - HTTP/1.1 505 HTTP Version Not Supported.
mimlo_61970
Cumulonimbus
Oct 07, 2014
Ok, so lets assume it is erroring on something other than the HTTP version.

I'm not sure how to attach a tcpdump here. In wireshark, you can right click on one of the packets and choose 'follow tcp stream' that will bring up a text representation of the request, hopefully allow you to compare them easily to see what is different. You can paste that in here if you want and I will look.
Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 07, 2014
Thank you for all of your help today, it has been invaluable. It will likely be tomorrow morning before I have an opportunity to dive deeper into the traces. I will be back on here then and let you know what I find.
Heidi_35827
Nimbostratus
Oct 13, 2014
I have a working monitor! Thanks to the help of my local F5 sales engineer a resident SOAP expert within F5 that he solicited for help (John Alam). He found two errors in my SOAP message - the URI following the POST message was incorrect. He found this by comparing my monitor string to the string in the SOAP request generated by SOAP-UI from my customer. The 2nd error he identified was missing whitespace in the SOAP envelope statement, before 'xmlns:v1'. Once I fixed those 2 errors - my pool members turned green. Thanks so much for all your help, mimlo!
- Roflcopter
  Nimbostratus
  Nov 30, 2018
  Would be be able to post your working string?

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Help with SOAP Monitor

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