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Synthetic Web Transactions

Community

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Authors:

Sonny Stormes

Maintainers:

Sonny Stormes

License:

GNU General Public License, Version 2, or later

Name:

ZenPacks.SonnyStormes.synthetictransactions

More Information:

GitHub page/HomePage

Git Sources (For Cloning):

Link

Synthetic Web Transactions ZenPack

This ZenPack provides monitoring of multi-step web transactions. The ZenPack leverages Twill scripts to monitor websites.

Support

This ZenPack is developed by the Zenoss user community and supported via our online forums. Zenoss, Inc. does not provide direct support for this ZenPack.

Releases

Version 2.1- Download: Compatible with Zenoss Core 2.5.x, Zenoss Core 3.2.x

Background

This ZenPack provides monitoring of multi-step web transactions. The ZenPack leverages Twill scripts to monitor websites.

After installing the ZenPack (noting the dependencies), add the desired website as a device making sure your "discovery protocol" is set to None and that SNMP monitoring is disabled (zSnmpMonitorIgnore = 'True').

To monitor a site, you need to create a twill script - To learn how to create a twill script, visit: twill dot idyll dot org (very simple to do! Hint: use the twill-sh interactive prompt to step through the transaction you wish to perform on your website) Make sure the name of this script matches the name of your device. (i.e. if you are monitoring www.zenoss.com - name the script www.zenoss.com and save it as a text file)

Helpful commands to use in twill:

showforms
show
follow <link name>

Which would log into slashdot with the username and password provided and check to see what the return code is. You can continue adding to this script by adding lines like "follow <link name>, or formvalue 1 <field> <value to add to form>, etc....

To get the best test, make sure you perform many operations within your twill script to verify the accuracy of the synthetic transaction. Click around, fill out forms, post information, and log out to make sure everything is working end-to-end on your site. The more detailed your transaction, the more accurate your test.

Setup

Copy your twill script to the scripts directory of the ZenPack - $ZENHOME/ZenPacks/ZenPacks.SonnyStormes.synthetictransactions-2.0-py2.6.egg/ZenPacks/SonnyStormes/synthetictransactions/scripts

Bind template to a device created with the FQDN of the site you wish to test.

If everything is in working order, bind the template to the devices.

As an example, I have included a small script that uses www.zenoss.org to get you started on your twill script creation.