Web Transaction (Browser)
Web Transaction (Browser) allows you to monitor the availability and performance of your web transactions using an actual web browser. To check the end-user experience–a robust recorder tool is used, which records the web transactions and then plays them back via a real browser like Firefox or Chrome. You can carry out all the testing from our 100+ global monitoring locations or a Private location (using Linux flavor based On-Premises Poller).
The Intelligent Capture functionality in Web Transaction (Browser) learns about changes made to any user interactive element in a web page and updates the scripts accordingly. When you change attributes such as ID, name, CSS, or xpath of a user-interactive element, you do not have to re-record or update the changes. For example, assume that a sign-up action on your web page has been captured. Then, for optimization, if you decide to modify the button’s name, ID or xpath, you can update the changes without having to re-record the action again. You can as well import the Selenium based test cases into the recorder tool to setup a Web Transaction (Browser) - Selenium WebDriver monitor.
How does it work?
Download the Web Transaction (Browser) Recorder (latest version), which records all the user interaction in your web application in their exact sequence and notifies when any error is detected. This monitoring feature will use an actual browser Firefox or Chrome to play-back the captured web transaction. Typical user transactions like login checks, form filling, AJAX requests, search in a page etc. can be captured and recorded. A maximum of 20 user transaction steps can be recorded. Site24x7 will then keep simulating these actions continuously, scanning for any sign of trouble. You can modify or edit your transactions at a later point of time inside the monitor form or add/delete/modify steps using the Web Transaction (Browser) recorder. You can also import the Selenium based Test Cases in .side/HTML format into your recorder to setup a Web Transaction (Browser)- Selenium WebDriver Monitor.
How Can I ?
Install a Web Transaction (Browser) Recorder
- Login to Site24x7.
- Click Admin > Inventory > Monitors > Add Monitor > Web Transaction (Browser).
- You will be navigated to Web Transaction (Browser) Screen.
- Download and install the Web Transaction (Browser) recorder 3.5.1. This Web Transaction (Browser) recorder supports Windows and Mac platforms.
- After the download, click the Web Transaction (Browser) recorder link and select Next to run the file in your system.
- To access the Site24x7 Web Transaction (Browser) recorder tool; follow the steps below:
- Windows Machine: Click Start Menu > All Programs > Site24x7 Web Transaction (Browser) recorder.
- Mac Machine: Click Launchpad icon> Click the Site24x7 Web Transaction (Browser) recorder icon.
Record a New Web Transaction
- Use Site24x7 login credentials to access the recorder tool. Once logged in, click "Record New Transaction" button.
- Type the URL of the application you wish to monitor in the address bar and press Enter. You can also click Record and enter URL to start a new transaction.
If the Recorded script has captcha fields, you'll be notified about this as a warning/information just before the actual Test playback starts. You can always skip this and proceed with the Test Playback.
- Browse through the application to record the desired sequence and click Preview and Save.
If you want to edit and update the script after recording it using the Web Transaction (Browser) recorder, you can save the script in local by navigating to "Actions > Save Web script local ", and use any text editor to edit the script. Once the editing is completed, you can import the script using "Actions > Open web script" and proceed with playback and add /update the existing monitor.
- Review the list of actions that you have performed along with the response time in milliseconds under Recorder Transactions in the Preview and Save screen.
- Step Details: The following actions can be performed in the Preview and Save transaction screen:
- Step Name: Modify the step name.
- Generate alert if the following keyword is NOT present: Select a particular step and enter the keywords which needs to be present in that action selected. Get alerted if the keyword is NOT present in that web page.
- Generate alert if the following keyword is present: Select a particular step and enter the keywords which need not be present in that action selected. Get alerted if the keyword is present in that web page.
You must adhere to the following conditions while adding keywords in the given field:
- A single string or keyword can be configured with/without any double quotes (ex: HTML).
- If there are two strings, which comprise a single keyword–add a space in between the two strings and enclose it with double quotes. (ex: "HTML response").
- In case you have more than a couple of individual keywords configured, you will have to separate them with a space and also use double quotes for each of them. ("monitor" "HTML").
- Click Next to update your Test Preferences:
- Page Load Timeout: The total estimated time taken to load the HTML and all its associated components including JavaScript and images. This time can be specified between 1 and 30 seconds.
- Delay Between Requests (Think Time): It's the time to wait before initiating the next step in the transaction, while running the test. This is useful when your webpage needs additional time to load all components correctly (mainly AJAX components). Value can be set between 0 and 10 seconds.
Think time is set as 3 seconds by default.
- Screen Resolution to be used for Monitor Playback: Pick your preferred screen resolution that yields best results during a playback by Site24x7.
The following screen resolutions are supported in Site24x7:
- 1024x768
- 1366x768
- 1600x900
- 1920x1080
- Select Browser For Monitoring: Choose between Chrome or Firefox browser for test playback.
- Geographical location to Test Playback: Select the radio button to choose the location from where the test playback should be performed.
You can press the radio button to choose an appropriate
global location or Private location for monitoring your website.
- Monitor Level Block Domains: If you want to exclude the traffic from a domain(s) while monitoring your web application, add those domains as comma separated domain names. This list is valid only for this monitor configuration.
- Account Level Block Domains: Add domain names that need to be ignored at a global account level, during monitoring. Learn how to block domains, while tracking user activity in google analytics.
Use a comma separated domain list to block multiple domains names.
- Click Next to initiate a trial playback of the recorded script from the chosen location.
You might encounter a 'Test Playback Failure' at times due to various reasons such as: errors in the script or issues with the location from where the test playback is happening. In such cases, you will be prompted with the option to 'Send Error Report'. Click on this button and contact support@site24x7.com
- After the Test Playback Result, Click Next.
On playback result, if there is a keyword failure, the trouble message (\"Keyword check failed\") will be displayed on the recorder screen.
- You might want to add a new monitor or update the existing monitor configuration. Click the relevant button as per your requirement.
You'll be able to view the below window with the
Update Existing Monitor button, only when there is a pre-existing real-browser monitor configured in your Site24x7 account. If you don't have any Web Transaction (Browser) setup in your account, you'll be directly asked to "
Add New Monitor".
- If you wish to add a new monitor, then specify the following parameters to set up the Web Transaction (Browser) monitor:
- Monitor Name: Enter the name of your monitor.
- Check Frequency: Choose the required polling frequency. The frequency can be set from 5 minutes to 1 day.
- Location Profile: Choose a global location or Private location from the dropdown list to setup monitoring of your website from this location. Choose your Linux flavor based On-Premise Poller from the drop down to customize your Private location. Additionally, customize and create location profiles based on your requirements.
To know more, refer Location Profile.
- Threshold and Availability Profile: Select a threshold profile from the drop down list or choose the default threshold set available and get notified when the resources cross the configured threshold and availability.
To create a customized threshold and availability profile, refer Threshold and Availability.
- Notification Profile: Choose a notification profile from the drop down or select the default profile available. Notification profile helps to configure when and who needs to be notifed in case of downtime.
Refer Notification Profile to create a customized notification profile.
- Associate with Monitor Group: Select a monitor group from the drop down list to logically group your monitors.
To learn how to create a group for your monitors, refer Monitor Groups.
- Click Save.
- Now that the web script is saved–the Web Transaction (Browser) monitor will be created in your Site24x7 account.
-
If you wish to update an existing monitor configured in your account, then you may choose the relevant monitor from the drop down box; Click the Fetch Steps button to view the steps for the chosen monitor.
- Click Update to modify the existing monitor.
-
The Update Existing Monitor step will be available only when there is a pre-configured Web Transaction (Browser) set up in your account.
Record a New Web Transaction (Browser) using Chrome Add-on
To install the Add-on:
Click the Recorder for Chrome button to access the add-on, and then click the Add to Chrome button. Once you finish this step you can start recording your transactions.
To start recording your transactions,
- Click on the
icon available on the tool bar. Select the Data Center and login to your Site24x7 account.
- Once logged in, you can click on the Record a New Transaction button.
Alternatively, you can also import a Selenium based script in .side format to your Web Transaction (Browser) Add-on using 'Open a Recorded Transaction' button.
If the Recorded script has captcha fields, you will be notified about this as a warning just before the actual Test playback starts. You can always skip this and proceed with the Test Playback.
- Enter the URL of the web page you would like to monitor and then start recording.
- In the new window that opens you can record all your transactions.
- Once you finish recording click on the
icon on the top right corner of the Add-on.
- Click on Playback and Save button to set all the preferences, to playback the recorded transaction and to add or update a monitor.
- Once you finish filling all the necessary fields click on Next button, to initiate a trial playback of the recorded script from the chosen location.
You might encounter a 'Test Playback Failure' at times due to various reasons such as: errors in the script or issues with the location from where the test playback is happening. In such cases, you will be prompted with the option to 'Send Error Report'. Click on the Send Error Report button and contact support@site24x7.com.
- After the Testplayback is successful click Next.
On playback result, if there is a keyword failure, the trouble message (\"Keyword check failed\") will be displayed on the recorder screen.
- You might want to add a new monitor or update the existing monitor configuration. Click the relevant button as per your requirement.
You will be able to view the below window with the Update Existing Monitor button, only when there is a pre-existing real-browser monitor configured in your Site24x7 account. If you don't have any Web Transaction (Browser) set up in your account, you'll be directly asked to "Add New Monitor".
- To add a new monitor click on the Add New Monitor button, fill in all the details and click Save.
- If you wish to update an existing monitor, then choose the relevant monitor from the drop down list. Click the Fetch Steps button to view the steps for the chosen monitor. Click Update to modify the existing monitor.
Edit/Modify Web Transaction (Browser) in the Web Client
- Modify the existing Display name of the monitor, if required.
- Update the individual Transaction Details as per need. Each transaction step will have multiple parameters that can be updated. Update the Step Name and Step URL, if required.
- You can also build a block domain list to restrict monitoring of these domains. Click the Block domains link. When you click the link, you'll be prompted with a pop up window, where you'd be asked to add the domain(s) at the Monitor level or Account level.
If you've specified block domain(s) at Monitor level, the traffic from the domain gets excluded for the specified monitor alone. However, if you've specified the domain(s) at the Account level, the traffic from the domain gets excluded globally across all your monitors in your Site24x7 account.
- Content Checks: Modify the Content Check settings as per your requirement.
-
URL Check: Specify the URL to verify it against the currently loaded URL. Based on your alert setting (Trouble/Down), an alert is automatically triggered when the URL check fails.
- Specify the following details to edit the monitor configuration:
- Think Time: It's the time to wait before initiating the next step in the transaction, while running the test. This is useful when your webpage needs additional time to load all components correctly (mainly AJAX components). Value can be set between 0 and 10 seconds. Think time is set as 3 seconds by default.
- Page Loading Timeout: The total estimated time taken to load the HTML and all its associated components including javascript and images. This time can be specified between 1 and 30 seconds.
- User Agent: Specify a custom user agent (web browser) to simulate different browser versions. You can customize this by specifying a relevant browser version.
- Resolution: Pick your preferred screen resolution that yields best results during a playback by Site24x7.
The following screen resolutions are supported in Site24x7:
- 1024x768
- 1366x768
- 1600x900
- 1920x1080
- Select Browser For Monitoring: Choose between Chrome or Firefox browser for test playback.
- Parallel Polling: Enable parallel polling to initiate data collection from all the configured monitoring locations simultaneously during hourly polls. Polling will be handled asynchronously, by default.
For session based application, if the polling occurs simultaneously across multiple locations, it will create concurrent sessions and thus affect the monitoring and lead to monitor failure. This is the reason for restricting parallel polling during hourly polls alone.
- Check frequency: Choose the required polling frequency. The frequency can be set from 5 minutes to 1 day.
- Monitoring locations: Choose a global location or Private location from the dropdown list to setup monitoring of your website from this location. Choose your Linux flavor based On-Premise Poller from the drop down to customize your Private location. Additionally, customize and create location profiles based on your requirements.
- Associate with Monitor Group(s): You can associate your monitor with multiple monitor groups by selecting the relevant monitor groups from the drop down list. This allows in logical grouping of your monitors.
To learn how to create a monitor group for your monitors, refer Monitor Groups.
- Dependent on monitor: Select a monitor from the drop-down list to choose it as your dependent resource. Alerts to your monitor will be suppressed based on the DOWN status of your dependent resource.
If you select "None" in the dependent resource field, alerting will progress as per your normal configuration settings. No alerts will be suppressed in this case as the monitor doesn't have any dependent resource.
Multiple monitor group support for monitors allow a monitor to be associated with multiple dependent resources in different monitor groups. If during a normal monitor status check, any one of these dependent resources' status is identified as
DOWN, the alert for the monitor will be automatically suppressed. However, the dependency configuration at monitor level is always given the higher priority over any other
monitor group level dependency configuration for suppressing alerts.
- HTTP Configuration
- HTTP Request Headers: Sometimes you might want to customize the default HTTP request header information. In such cases, the additional header name and header value can be added here.
- User Agent: Set customized user agent (web browser) for sending your request and the HTTP headers.
- Specify the following details for Configuration Profiles:
- Threshold and Availability: Select a threshold profile from the drop down list or choose the default threshold set available and get notified when the resources cross the configured threshold and availability.
To create a customized threshold and availability profile, refer Threshold and Availability.
- Notification Profile: Choose a notification profile from the drop down or select the default profile available. Notification profile helps to configure when and who needs to be notifed in case of downtime.
Refer Notification Profile to create a customized notification profile.
- User Alert Group: Select the user group that need to be alerted during a outage.
To add multiple users in a group, see User Groups.
- Tags: Associate your monitor with predefined Tag(s) to help organize and manage your monitors creatively. Learn how to add Tags.
- IT Automation: Select an automation to be executed when the website is down/trouble/up/any status change/any attribute change. The defined action gets executed when there is a state change and selected user groups are alerted.
To automate corrective actions on failure, refer IT Automation.
- Third Party Integrations: Associate your monitor with a pre-configured third-party service. It lets you push your monitor alarms to selected services and facilitate improved incident management.
If you haven't setup any integrations yet, navigate across to
”Admin > Third Party Integration” to create one.
Tell me more.
- Click Save.
Note: Uptime Steroid is a feature that helps to check the availability of your first URL in the sequence by polling every 1 minute. This will help in identifying status of the URL.So if you wish to enable this option you can go to Edit option, click Save and then Uptime Steroid will be activated.
Advanced Webscript Editing
Advanced Web Script Editing lets you edit your existing web script, perform test playback and modify the existing script with an inline editor-all without having to use the Web Transaction (Browser) recorder. Read this document to learn how to execute webscript edit.
Follow the steps below to initiate Advanced Webscript Edit:
-
- Login to Site24x7.
- Identify the monitor from the Monitor dashboard and open the relevant details page.
- Click Edit Web Script option.
- Alternatively, you can also open the edit monitor form and click Edit Web Script option given there.
- Edit the properties using the inline editor and initiate test playback after modifying the configuration settings. Once completed, the edited version replaces the previous script completely and the monitor configuration is also updated.
Clone Web Transaction (Browser):
You can replicate an existing Web Transaction (Browser) monitor using the Clone Web Transaction (Browser) option in Site24x7 web client. Using the Edit Webscript option in the web client, you can additionally make necessary step changes before cloning your monitor.
Follow the instructions below to successfully clone a Web Transaction (Browser) Monitor:
Troubleshooting Tips:
icon and click Clone.
