From: Glen Holcomb <damnbigman@...>
Date: 2009-07-24T04:02:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Watching a website for periodic outages

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On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@gmail.com>wrot=
e:

> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Glen Holcomb<damnbigman@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Can anyone think of a better way to do this?  Or point me to some
> > SafariWatir documentation?  What ever I use needs to be able to handle
> > Javascript and cookies.
>
> OK, re-read.   _Why_ does it need to handle javascript and cookies?
>
> To monitor if it's up and responding, you really only need to get
> straight http, check that you didn't get an error code (401 404 etc),
> and parse the resulting html to make sure it's not an error message
> from your application.
>
> Now, if you really need something that will handle cookies, and do
> logins etc (but not javascript), you_could_ use JMeter, but it's
> probably overkill to use it just to see if a site is up...
>
>
The problem is this:

We have an application that is misbehaving, and despite paying for support
from the vendor we don't actually recieve "support" from the vendor.  The
application is serving static content all the time without issue.  However
at certain (random) times it will hang when you request anything that isn't
static content.  The login page is the only page that is entirely static.

So unfortunately you need to be attempting to log in or already logged in
and requesting "internal" content to notice the issue.  Basically I'm
wanting to log when these are occuring and how long they last so we can be
more selective when looking for the cause.

I tried Watir but after a while of clicking on links inside the app Safari
hangs.  I was looking at Selenium but the gem didn't seem to install all th=
e
required files.

I need javascript because the vendor decided that the login form should be
javascript so that that one frame can be SSL encrypted while leaving the
rest of the content clear, to increase performance under high load I guess.

I was looking for a Ruby way to get into the app and once there make sure
responses are timely, if not I wanted to log the interval of discontent.

--=20
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand, Your actions speak
so loud, I can=92t hear a word you=92re saying."

-Greg Graffin (Bad Religion)

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