Working with apps that rely on OCI communication, it’s often a good help to know how reliable the EWS is responding to your app’s requests – so that when users are complaining you’ll be able to sort away those support requests that are really related to reliability issues on the server side.

Checking the ability to answer on e.g. port 2208 is fine, but not a good picture of the fairly complicated mechanism that handles a complete OCI session – being a big fan of Smokeping, I put together a quick perl script that does a complete OCI login and logout session and then reports the time it took.

Using that on e.g. BroadSoft’s sandbox, Smokeping provides me with graphs like this:

The Smokeping Probe wrapper is at OCITester.pm and the script that does the actual checking is ociping.pl

(note that the Probe wrapper assumes ociping.pl to be available as /usr/local/bin/ociping.pl)

To use it you will need to add:

*** Probes ***
+ OCITester

to the Probes section of the Smokeping config and then for each target something like this:

++ ewsxdpexample
probe = OCITester
username = yourownusername@xdp.broadsoft.com
password = yourownpassword
menu = ews.xdp.broadsoft.com
title = ews.xdp.broadsoft.com (199.19.193.54) OCI
host = 199.19.193.54

Feel free to use it as you see fit – and if you do, note that it’s made available as “beerware” :-)