Hello,
Our website is hosted by a vendor and we recently had an outage where the site was "down" for roughly ten hours due to none of the alarms having activated. The outage was with a backend process, so the site was returning a cryptic DB error to users. Since the site was responding with something other than a standard error code, none of the alarms went off.
I am looking for a monitoring service that would check the website periodically and emulate a few user actions - such as accessing a couple of pages and making certain a specific result comes back (i.e. not just pages of SQL errors). The goal is to detect a situation where the web server is operational but the content is not being delivered as expected.
Any ideas or suggestions? I prefer a hosted service, however if there is a tool I can run on one of my windows servers I am open to that as well. The key is that we do not host the site, so I don't have server level access to the site.
Thanks.
1. You need to use Firefox
2. Download Selenium IDE
3. Record some tests
4. Playback
This is the simple way. There is also iMacros which works on more platforms.
Selenium IDE is a simple record and playback features and is a addon to Firefox.
Selenium also have Selenium RC where you have to develop a test progrsm so you need to know a language.
If you have some java development skills then this can be done free as well using htmlunits.
Now this is not automated in that you have to trigger the tests. You need to design your tests carefully.
Regarding outages maybe you can change your code to email users on failure, and of course the logs investigated.