Monitoring basics

If your subscription only includes access to our testing service, you won't be able to use kapptivate Monitoring. If you have subscribed to kapptivate Monitoring but cannot see it in the interface, it may be that your account doesn't have the permission to access it. If that is the case, you should contact your local administrator to request access privilege.

 

Please read the instructions below or browse the following video:

A monitoring is a test that runs regularly without requiring manual action from your side. It generates KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and other metrics to give you new insights into your quality of service.

In this page, we will see how to take advantage of this powerful tool. To switch to the monitoring interface and get started, click the kapptivate Monitoring button at the top of the page: 

 

You will land in the Overview page, which is empty for now: 

 

Instead of kapptivate API and kapptivate Web, you should see the name of your products, each one in a dedicated block. But what are these blocks for? Normally, they display a summary of your monitoring tests, letting you know at a glance when there is something going wrong. There is nothing for now because we haven't configured any monitoring test to run periodically yet. Let's change this.

Click to visit the Monitoring page:

 

You are in the main interface to configure your monitorings. Again, you will see your products (instead of kapptivate API and kapptivate Web), each one inside a separate area. Click to Add a monitoring on the product of your choice:

 

Then, you must select a test that will be run periodically. For our example, we will reuse the test that we created in the last page, the one named Your first test:

 

As soon as you have selected a test, you'll see a more complete form on your screen:

This form has three configuration parts:

Let's set the name to "Your first monitoring" and the frequency to Every 30 seconds. And then, click Save.

For the sake of the example, and to see what happens when a monitoring fails, we'll add another monitoring on the same test, that will have no name, and that will use a non existing URL for its variable API_URL. We'll make it run every two minutes: 

 

Once you have saved the two monitorings, you can see them in the Monitoring page:

 

Each monitoring test has an identifying number in the Monitoring column (e.g. 74, 77), and its name, if there is one, is also displayed there.

In the Frequency column, you will find a shortcut to change the scheduling of each monitoring:

 

And in the Actions column, there are buttons to edit it, delete it or force it:

 

Forcing a monitoring test means that it will be executed right now, instead of waiting for the next 30 seconds or 2 minutes.

 

Monitoring tests are tremendously useful to regularly get information about the state of your services. But how do we access that information?

Go back to the Overview page:

 

After some time, you should start seeing some data: 

What does this graph mean? The green indicates success, and gray or red color indicate different kinds of failure. Red color means that the test failed because an assertion failed. Gray color means a failure either caused by an internal error, or some action couldn't be played. If you remember, we entered a non-existing URL in our second monitoring. This erroneous URL causes the test to fail since the API cannot even be called.

This overview screen shows data from the last two hours and is updated in real time. What if we want to zoom in to a specific time range? We can do this with the mouse by selecting the area we want in the graph:

Once the mouse button is released, we can see data from our time range more precisely. Also notice the message Information displayed are not in real time which confirms that we are no longer looking at the latest data:

The data that is shown to use is aggregated data: for instance, if we have a monitoring test scheduled to run every 10 seconds but we are looking at data aggregated by two minutes, each data point will correspond to a summary of 12 tests results (because one run every 10 seconds over 2 minutes equals to a total 12 runs).

To see the result of individual runs, click the magnifier icon in the top-right corner above the chart:

 

A new page appears, that shows the result of each run, each bar representing one run: 

 

All the run bars are clickable:

 

Clicking one of them will take you to another view showing the details of each run result:

 

And finally, if you wish to see the detailed results of one specific monitoring test's run, click the Details button:

 

And you will be able to see the results, the same way you could see the result of a test manually started as in the previous part: 

 

You should be ready now to create your own automated tests and schedule monitoring tests based on them. Although this tour only introduced you to the basics, you will discover that kapptivate Testing & Monitoring has much more to offer. If you're feeling adventurous, we suggest that you take a look at the Analytics menu in the left sidebar, and the dashboards feature. We wish you good luck in your journey!