Web Application Monitoring Just Got Better!

Since the inception of Scoutbees, our synthetic testing tool for websites, VDI, and SaaS applications, we have detected issues with Facebook, Azure, Office 365, and other internet giants. These companies have sterling uptimes and far exceed our expectations. They have been so reliable that when they do experience issues, we often waste our time and resources investigating other issues before discovering they are the culprit.

Over the years, Scoutbees has matured and evolved to meet the demands of our customers. For example, a while back, we introduced application monitoring to make it easier to monitor MS Exchange Online and Teams. 

However, you may have noticed a new popup on the dashboard inviting you to try our new Web Transaction Scout. I will explain what these are and why you will want to use them.

Figure 1 – Web Transaction Scout

At the highest level, Web Transactions build on our proven Scoutbees framework to allow you to simulate click-for-click interactions that you or your users have with web applications! Scoutbees will initiate this at predefined times and report any anomalies encountered when running the test. If a test fails, interested parties are informed so they can take appropriate actions to remediate the issue or alert the help desk and users so they are aware of the problem.

For example, an e-commerce site may have an application that requires their customers to log in to a web application using a username and password and then navigate a drop-down menu to a specific location, click on an element on that page, and then enter information in a text box on the page. Using Web Transactions, you can automate all these steps! Web Transactions replaces the tedious and error-prone process of having someone manually test the website, or waiting until someone reports an issue with it, or, worse yet, having customers go to a competitor’s website when they encounter difficulties with yours.

As with the other Scoutbees tests, each Web Transaction test will have an overview dashboard and individual report of each test.

The overview dashboard shows the performance of the tests over time so you can spot trends or quickly spot anomalies on the website or web-based application tested.

Figure 2 – Overview Dashboard

Each time a test is completed, successful or not, it creates a record of the transactions of the test.

Figure 3 – Test Results

Clicking on a specific test instance provides the time it takes for each of the steps in the test to complete. This gives you detailed insights into what happened while the testing took place.

Figure 4 – Test Details

You can create an alert policy based on different metrics when the testing took place.

Figure 5 – Alert Creation

When a problem is detected an alert can be sent via an email, webhook, or it can integrated into ITSM systems like ServiceNow.

If you currently use Scoutbees, Web Transitions can be found by clicking the Applications tab and selecting Web Transactions from the Type drop-down menu.

Figure 6 – Test Creation

If you are unfamiliar with Scoutbees, you can visit this web page for more information, to start a free trial or to book a demo of them or any other of ControlUp’s award-winning products.