Synthetic Monitoring with Selenium

This tutorial demonstrates how Selenium automation tests can be turned into full synthetic monitoring using Step.

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Illustration for Synthetic Monitoring with Selenium

Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring, is a method of monitoring your applications by simulating users, and directing the path they might take through the application. This provides information on the availability and performance of your critical business transactions.

This tutorial will demonstrate how Selenium automation tests can be turned into full-fledged synthetic monitoring in just a few minutes, simply by leveraging the Step platform. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll be able to setup end-to-end synthetic monitoring for a web application (such as our e-shop opencart demo application) by:

Integrating your selenium test case with Step
Designing and configuring your synthetic monitoring
Visualizing the performance and availability dashboard
Setting up alerts in order to get notified in case of errors

We prepared a small Java project that will be used throughout this tutorial. The project uses Selenium to automate interactions with a (demo) online shop: OpenCart. We host a demo instance specifically to be used for our web automation tutorials.

Because the reusability of your automation artifacts is one of the main advantages of Step, you can directly jump to the definition of the scenario if you already followed our tutorial for selenium load testing

In this tutorial we will use this selenium automation to set up synthetic monitoring on our online shop application.

Requirements

Access to a Step cluster: Get started quickly by setting up a free SaaS cluster in the Step Portal, or, if preferred, follow the Installation page to configure your own on-premise cluster.
Git
Maven 2 or higher
JDK 11 or higher
(optional) The Chrome browser
(optional) ChromeDriver, for automating a browser

Hint: The optional software is recommended to follow the local parts of this tutorial. You can skip all steps requiring ChromeDriver and still finish the tutorial if you are only following the SaaS solution.

Preparing the sample project

We have prepared a sample project that will be used throughout this tutorial which uses Playwright to automate interactions with a test environment called OpenCart that is provided by us.

1. Get the code

The project is available on GitHub; to clone it using git, run:

  git clone git@github.com:exense/step-tutorials.git

2. Look at the source code

Take a moment to look at the sample project code

The class SeleniumOpencartTestcaseAsKeyword illustrates how to transform simple selenium automation code into a Step keyword* in no time. To integrate it with Step:
extend the class AbstractKeyword
and use the @Keyword annotation on the method containing your selenium test case
The SeleniumOpencartSingleKeywords class shows how to split the exact same selenium code into individual keywords*, each representing one user interaction.
requires slightly more modification of your automation code but enables to:
reuse the same automation code to simulate multiple user paths with Step
get automatic performance measurements for individual user interactions**
Finally, for both classes, Junit tests are provided to execute and validate your keywords locally.

*Definition: In Step, keywords are the primary building blocks implementing your automation. Using the keyword API, you can transform any automation code into a keyword seamlessly.

**Note: With the first approach, performance measurements will be created automatically for the entire test case only, but you can use the keyword api to add custom measurements in your code.

3. (optional) Run tests locally, requires ChromeDriver

To see the interactions that are performed, run the JUnit tests:

  cd step-tutorials/step-selenium-tutorials

# If ChromeDriver is installed system-wide and added to the path:
mvn clean compile test

# Otherwise, explicitly specify the ChromeDriver path:
mvn clean compile test -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=c:/tools/chromedriver/chromedriver.exe

The test cases will automate a browser to add a product to the cart and perform a checkout.

4. Package the code

Finally, we will create a Java package (jar file) that can be used to ship the automation code as keywords to Step. To do so, run:

  mvn clean package -DskipTests

This command creates a jar file named step-selenium-tutorials-0.0.0.jar in the target folder of the project directory. This is the file that we will use in the subsequent steps.

Switch to your Step instance

If you have access to an existing Step instance (on-premise or cloud), access it and log in, see prerequisites if not. Remember that for on-premise setup Chrome and Chromedriver must be available on the Step’s agents.

1. Import the keyword package

Step has a special view for managing Keywords. This screenshot shows the Keywords view with the Upload Package dialog open as a reference for the next steps.

Navigate to Keywords
Click the Upload Package button
Select the demo-opencart-selenium-0.0.0.jar as the package file
Hint: Make sure you selected the correct file. If successful you will see two keywords listed.
Click Save to do the import

2. Define the TestCase

Now that all the basics are established, we can setup a TestCase to define the monitored feature. This is done in Step with plans.

Navigate to Plans
Click + to create a new plan
Enter a name
Select “TestCase” as a Template
Click Save and edit

3. Configure the plan

The visual plan editor is the main tool in to create and edit plans in Step. We will use this to create the TestCase, so get familiar with the UI explained in this screenshot:

We will familiarize ourselves with the Step visual editor by adding the keyword: “Opencart Testcase as Keyword” and executing it once.

Select “Keywords” in the Component tabs
Select the keyword “Opencart Testcase as Keyword” in the list shown Hint: Filter the components to easily find your keywords.
Click Start execution and confirm with the play button in the dialog

Synthetic monitoring

Step contains a powerful scheduler module that allows us to execute plans periodically.

1. Setup the synthetic monitoring

To actually perform the synthetic monitoring, we will use the scheduling feature of Step. Simply click the “run” button and schedule the executions with your choice of frequency:

Now that the synthetic monitoring is in place, you will see in the next sections how to monitor the performance and availability of your system, as well as how to create notifications in order to be automatically alerted in case of error.

2. Monitor your scheduled executions

On the Monitoring view you can follow the latest status of your scheduled tasks. You can do this by clicking on the last execution to see the related execution reports, or by clicking on the chart icon to jump to the performance dashboard.

3. Analyze monitoring

On the performance dashboard, you can easily follow the overall performance and success rate of your synthetic monitoring, as well as the detailed statistics for individual user interaction with the monitored system.

4. Notifications for the monitoring

Pre-requisite: You will need to configure your notification gateway (email or webhooks).

While you can actively check the status and performance using the monitoring and dashboard views, for synthetic monitoring it is always recommended to be automatically alerted in case of errors. Setting up alerts for a given plan can be done directly from an execution or from the Notification Subscription menu entry.

Select Alerting → Notifications in the menu and create a new subscription. Select the plan you want to receive notifications about, the event that should trigger them and a Gateway where they should be delivered on.

Monitor and analyze the results

On the Monitoring view, you can follow the latest status of your scheduled tasks:

click on the last execution to see the related execution reports
click on the chart icon to jump to the performance dashboard

1. Analyze the results

On the performance dashboard, you can easily follow the overall performance and success rate of your synthetic monitoring, as well as find detailed statistics for individual user interaction within the monitored system.

2. Setup alerts with notification subscriptions

Prerequisite: If not already configured, you will need to configure your notification gateway (email or webhooks)

While you can actively check the status and performance using the monitoring and dashboard views, during synthetic monitoring it is always recommended to be automatically alerted in case of errors. Setting up alerts for a given plan can be done directly from an execution, or from the Notification Subscription menu entry.

Here we create an alert for our plan for failing executions:

Here we set up notifications for failed executions in our Synthetic Monitoring plan

Detect slow response times

To realize the full potential of synthetic monitoring, nonfunctional assertion should be added to the plan in order to detect response times above SLA. You can easily do that by adding performance assertions to your plan.

add PerformanceAssert from the Controls tab
type the exact name of the keyword that should be measured
specify “lower than” (default)
select the SLA (3000 is default)

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