Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor

While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.