Membrane Monitor Quick Start Guide
This tutorial explains how to set up a simple monitoring of HTTP or SOAP messages.
In this setup the client has to be modified to send messages to the monitor instead of sending messages
directly to the target service. Then the monitor can display the message and route it to its final destination.
Figure 1:
Starting the Monitor
Download a Membrane Monitor distribution and unpack its content into any folder.
Then doubleclick the file membrane-monitor.exe.
After starting Membrane Monitor you can see the monitor GUI. To monitor connections you have to create a service proxy.
Adding a Service Proxy
Click on the Add Button.
Figure 2:
Now choose the Simple Service Proxy and click on the next button.
Figure 3:
Assume you want to monitor messages to your local server. First we have to specify at which TCP port the monitor is listening. You can choose any available port e. g. 2000.
Figure 4:
Now we specify the target where the monitor should send the messages to. Set Host to localhost and Port to the port used by the server where your service is running.
Figure 5:
After clicking the Finish button, the service proxy is waiting for incoming messages.
Now if the monitor receives a message on port 2000 the service proxy will forward it to port 8000 on the same host.
Testing the Monitoring Setup
Open the URL http://localhost:2000 in your browser.
If you are using Tomcat you should see something like the screenshot in figure 6.
Figure 6:
Have a look at the Monitor GUI.
Figure 7:
Now you can start monitoring HTTP connections. If you want to monitor SOAP go ahead and read the next section.
Modifying the Client for SOAP Monitoring
The target endpoint address of the SOAP client has to be changed to the address of the monitor.
Messages have to be sent to the monitor so that the monitor can display and send them to their final destination.
Suppose the target service and the monitor are running on the same computer. Then the only thing
you have to change is the port number of the endpoint address. For example the endpoint address
http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/MyService
has to be changed to
http://localhost:2000/axis2/services/MyService
How to modify the endpoint address for a particular toolkit is described in the following documents:
Other toolkits like .NET, Perl or Python can be monitored with Membrane as well.
Monitoring
Now you can start the client and have a look at the GUI of the monitor. Figure 8 shows a captured request response message exchange.
Figure 8:
Besides displaying the request and response messages, Membrane Monitor offers a lot of functionality, e.g. to manipulate and resend messages. Have a look at the HowTos and the documentation.