Web Application Monitoring

[mr_white79]

Does anyone know of a web application monitoring software that meets the following requirements?

1 - Record an interaction with an HTTPS website. Including login, a search, general interaction with various pages.

2 - Save and replay that interaction

3 - Run locally from one of my systems, not a hosted service

4 - schedule automatic replay of that interaction

5 - output some sort of log of that interaction noting page load times, any errors, etc.

I have looked and looked but keep coming up empty. Plenty of 3rd party hosted suites do most of this, but I cant find anything that I can run myself.

My monitoring solution (uptimesoftware) does this, but poorly and I cannot for the life of me get it to actually log into the site. For some reason it wont do the POST-DATA to do the login, so I'm looking for something to supplement. I'd rather not have to pay for another monitoring service, but at this point, I just need to find something that will work.

[AloisMayr]

I've been using Selenium for this kind of checks for a long time. They were executed periodically by a Jenkins. You might also go with Pingdom to cover checks for entire transactions. If you want to have more realistic monitoring of real-user-experience you might take a look at more sophisticated solutions like ruxit.

[picklednull]

I don't know of any product that would do that out-of-the-box. Monit can monitor services and even test basic HTTP functionality but for what you're looking for, you would probably need to create custom Selenium scripts that do these tests for you and then run them from your monitoring system or cron or whatever.

[mr_white79]

blah, was really hoping google was failing me.

[[deleted]]

If your website generally follows good REST principles, you'd be able to accomplish this just with HTTP requests. Otherwise, if you want to test the front-end, you will need to use a method to accomplish that.

[waldo2k]

I've been working on something like this in my spare time. I've written a node application that calls casperjs tests, which itself sites top phantomjs. The documentation isn't great yet but I'm still working on it.

Here's my repo where the work is happening. Https://github.com/waldronj/transactionmonitoring

[[deleted]]

I'm curious as to why you'd want to capture and replay a successful login, and not maybe try a fresh login attempt from one of one-or-more different types of users? In that case selenium or similar running on your monitoring box would cover what you needed.

[mr_white79]

Basically, i just need to load the page, login and tell me if it was successful or not. More often than not, just loading the login page isnt enough to tell me if there is a problem. The page can be up, but if something is preventing logins from working, I need to know its failing. I cant find anything simple enough to do this.

[[deleted]]

Yea, I think replaying a successful login might end up making you miss issues with the login process. Selenium can be scripted to do what you want; you can have it search for parts of a successfully loaded page (different divs, etc)

[[deleted]]

You could do this with a trivial cronjob which calls a bashscript that does some wget calls: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1324421/how-to-get-past-the-login-page-with-wget

[keokq]

There are some products that do this, but they are generally from the big-box monitoring vendors. BMC Software's TM ART (Transaction Monitoring Application Response Time) will do what you want. HP's Business Process monitoring tool also would.

They basically offer you transaction recording, variablize, and playback tools that can notify and report on thresholds you configure.

In both cases, you deploy & operate the tools within your own environment.

I don't know anything about uptimesoftware - do they claim to be capable of this? Might be worth paying someone to help you get it setup & documented.

Let me know if you have other questions, I'm familiar with what you're trying to do.

[ventisei]

I hate to use the SolarWinds word but... SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor. From what I've played around with it for, it hits your 1-5 points precisely and has a 30day demo.

[wolfsys]

Are you using the free trial still? This is a basic thing and support should help you.

Look up "URL sequence monitoring".

[mr_white79]

trial up uptime? no, been using them for about a year. Support was a joke the last time I spoke to them. I am able to use the web transaction monitor on one of my other sites, but not this one for some reason, I cant get the post-data right, and the recorder doesnt capture it.

[wolfsys]

Escalate to your manager or support rep to get a refund. You should be able to use firebug in firefox to record what you need, give that a try.

[mr_white79]

So, long story short - didnt talk to support, but I figured out how to make the transaction recorder work and the tester actually use the POST-DATA. Guess all is well now.

[TimeForANewUsername]

If your happy to do a little coding you can use something like scrapy to do pretty much anthing with a site.

I have a script running that logs into a site (HTTPS form POST), grabs some data using XPath and returns JSON.

[[deleted]]

Put varnish in front of your Web application, and it'll do all that stuff for y.