Leveraging Selenium To Create Effective, Dynamic Monitoring Scripts

Creating sophisticated scripts for monitoring and also testing of different features and aspects of a website are essential for any business who wants to ensure top quality of their site and not suffer poor performance due to varying load conditions. Until now, it’s been difficult to create scripts in an effective manner due to a large variety and also volume of programming languages, some of which are “closed” and others not compatible. Because of this, businesses have been restricted to using support services that use the same language that the business is using or hiring/buying in-house knowledge.

Recently, a cost-effective and very user-friendly actor has entered the arena, Selenium. Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web and cloud applications that lets you record and playback scenarios directly in your browser. The scenarios can then be edited and remade for full customization. The framework is open source and also available as a Firefox plug-in, making it easy to find and even easier to use. The recording feature is simple plug and play and doesn’t leave much room for error since the script can be played and edited before made into a scenario and launched towards a website or URL.

A big advantage with Selenium versus URL Proxy-based setups, for example, is that you don’t have to code the dynamic creations of URL that is the result of the GUI interaction with the browser. The script only uses the content, fields and buttons of the webpage. This means that the result is much more prepared versus changes. Update of an image, style sheet etc. will not break the script as it would do for a URL-based script.  A small anecdote is that; a load runner program will use a URL-based instruction set and is thus very sensitive for changes in the page. Hence, they chose the name Selenium – which is the mineral that is the cure to mercury poisoning.

Since the introduction and emergence of Cloud Computing, many different players have emerged to supply the ever-growing demand for services, data, hosting, monitoring, load testing and so forth. The hosting and data services often end up with who has the largest server park since the price is often the point of difference. But when you monitor or perform a load test it is essential to know that you are able to describe a rather complicated process in an easy fashion for your clients. Ease of use and transparence is everything.

Customers that already have hosting solutions or host themselves may demand a specific tool and/or a platform to perform the load tests from since data storage and the creation of load is costly. When using Selenium, you can have the peace of mind knowing you bridge the gap between hosting and testing, which benefits the entire Cloud Computing marketplace since it becomes much more transparent.

Vendors such as Apica support Selenium scripting to simplify the process for their clients when they want to manage their own tests. With this, they have full control and visibility of all the steps in a scenario. Self-service is, by nature, a part of a cloud offering. Unique to that of other testing competitors in the market, Apica allows for Selenium scripts to be reused through Apica WebPerformance (ApicaWatch), as well as load testing through Apica LoadTest, thus saving clients an incredible amount of time and money in the long run.