FusionReactor Crash Protection – Regular Expressions “HowTo”

FusionReactor – the leading ColdFusion server monitoring software – has a nifty Crash Protection feature allowing it to abort requests that take too long. This works in a similar way to the ColdFusion server page timeouts but at a lower level allowing FusionReactor to stop requests under many more circumstances. FusionReactor also gives you the options not to abort the request, but just to email you a stack trace of the slow running page. There are several forms of crash protection FusionReactor provides but I won’t get in to those just now – take a look at the FusionReactor site for more information ( http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fr/featurefocus/crashprotection.cfm ).

One of the ways in which FusionReactor timeout protection is better is the ability to configure include (or exclude) lists of page URLs. This can be done with regular expressions. Let’s look at a couple of examples…

First of all we need to imagine our directory layout:

  • wwwroot
    • public
      • my_first_page.cfm
      • my_second_page.cfm
      • my_third_page.cfm
      • my_fourth_page.cfm
    • scheduled_tasks
      • task1.cfm
      • task2.cfm
      • task3.cfm

In our examples, we’ll assume we’re looking at timeout protection and the crash protection settings are all configured for all URLs.

Example 1

Let’s look at exlcluding everything inside the “scheduled_tasks” folder. The first step is to ensure the restrictions are “enabled” and the behaviour mode is to “ignore matching requests”:

Next, we add a new regular expression RegEx for the exclusion:

You can see the RegEx matches on path only (unless you choose to include hostname). Additionally it optionally matches URL parameters and can exclude URL from statistics (eg average request time).

The RegEx’s are standard Java patterns. The online help describes some examples which are available from the FR interface from your server or on the FusionReactor website – http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fr/help/help.htm#creating_a_regular_expression_exclusion.htm

The Java (1.4.2) Pattern docs are available here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

Example 2

Exclude the public files “my_…._page.cfm” where “….” does not include the character “t”…

/public/my_[^t]*_page.cfm

[^t] = any character except “t”

* = any number of the previous matching group (ie [^t])

Hopefully this gets you on the way to configuring not only your crash protection but excluding your scheduled tasks from server level statistics so you get a better idea of the stats for public facing traffic. We can offer a lot of help and advice and have a wide range of consulting & development services available to assist you no matter the project size.

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