Full-Page Monitoring
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What is Full Page Monitoring?
Traditional site monitoring tools emulate browsers to check a site's availability and performance. That is perfect to get the performance and uptime under ideal conditions. Full Page Monitoring allows you to verify a site's performance as perceived by the end-user using a real browser.
Today’s sites commonly use Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and Flash) to allow collaboration between the components of a site, from their different global locations. The only way to accurately monitor the performance of each component of a Web 2.0 site is to use a real browser to execute the JavaScript. By checking that each component is correctly responding, Full Page Monitoring functionally verifies that your composite site is working, from the web server right through to the user's browser.
Examples
Why monitor your site with Full Page Monitoring?
Current Web 2.0 technologies used to collaborate between multiple sources and deliver content using JavaScript, Flash, Ajax and CSS are all known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA). With RIAs, much of the execution of a site's content happens on the client's browser rather than the web. Examples include the social networking sites, Facebook and YouTube, which encourage their users to collaborate, and share information using Web 2.0 technologies. Amazon's rich media site also depends on Web 2.0 technologies to display multimedia ads and animation.
Traditional monitoring only simulates one part of a browser, the HTTP protocol. By contrast, Full Page Monitoring is a real browser, which uses multiple connections, renders a page, builds a DOM and executes JavaScript which is not done by a simple HTTP web check. One example of this would be Curl versus Internet Explorer.
Traditional website monitoring does not check network connects or execute RIAs, therefore it cannot accurately report on an actual end-user site experience. Full Page Monitoring conducts tests using end-user browsers. It checks how they manage the asynchronous communication of RIAs and reports on the browser's execution time.
The CA App Synthetic Monitor dashboard contains reports that detail the exact download sequence. By pinpointing the components of your site that are causing delays and errors, you can optimize to ensure that your site is delivering the best possible end-user experience.
Examples
What are the Features of CA App Synthetic Monitor Full Page Monitoring?
- Support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera & Safari web browser profiles
- Monitors run from 110+ global monitoring stations
- Real browser performance metrics (e.g. when have all elements been loaded and is the page ready to be rendered in your browser).
- JavaScript error reporting
- Timed screenshots of a website loading in the browser (e.g. from a white screen to the full page)
- Waterfall charts of all embedded elements in a page (images, CSS files, etc.)
- The ability to avoid spurious hits in site analytics trackers
Examples
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Give it a try!
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- In your CA App Synthetic Monitor Settings tab create a new monitor
- Select “browser” as the monitor type
- From the dropdown menu select the browser you wish to use
- Tick the check box for “Alert on Java script errors” if you wish to be alerted when JavaScript errors are detected
- Select where you will "Allow browser to make requests to": To avoid spurious hits in your site's visitor statistics do not include domains to any analytics trackers in the “Extra domains” field (visible if you choose "selected domains")
- Complete the remaining fields and click the “Save” button