Some thoughts after my first day on the general release of SEUM.
As background I did run through all the stages of the beta and felt the product was worthy of a purchase.
It appears a lot more of beta dicussion points made it into the general release than I had expected. Some very nice stuff with the avg run times on groupings or locations and cumilative averages.
After day 1 here are my notes on what still needs work.
adding recordings to playback locations is clunky.
hard to figure out where to add them, slow (not possible as far as I've found) to add multiple recordings to a location, or add a recording to multiple sites outside of the creation of the recording.
Even after I figured out how to do this after the fact I kept having issues refinding the method to do it a few hours later.
x y coordinate fallback
I know we discussed this in the beta and I still think it needs to be on the roadmap. This gives all clients an absolute fallback to recording issues. Its a pain to use but your competitors all use it and in some cases you need to use it.
step wait
Steps within a recording need the ability to wait or pause in cases where you more accurately want to simulate a user. The ability to add pauses after the fact would be a bonus.
This is not an issue of the playbacks proceeding before a step completes but more control factor over how one wishes to run their transactions. Not every transaction is a race.
atlas step level support
This one is critical for me and I started a separate thread on it before. Our current vendor makes visual display of all steps within a transaction very visable and this is something I need to replicate before our final cutover. I will definitely hold off getting more transactions until this is in the product.
issues on install of player
I had one issue installing the updated player on an existing beta player box. did the uninstall, reinstall and got worker process could not launch on every playback. had to reboot, reinstall, etc several times to clear out what ever was causing the issue. It was likely a one off but I thought I'd throw it out there to anyone else replacing beta playback with the final version. It is fixable and the logs were a big help in determining what needed to happen.
The install otherwise went without issue onto a standalone APM box. I did notice when I had the SEUM server running playbacks as well there was a significant impact to http/s template responses in APM. I created another local playback agent and the issue went away.
preventing playback overlap
I am noticing what I believe is overlapping playbacks between my playback locations. This causes session errors when deploying the same recording out to multiple sites. It may be a necessary evil to run each site as a different user to prevent this but it would be nice to see some sort of visibility or control into overlapping transactions to prevent such things from occuring.
I realise as your playback locations increase it would eventually be impossible to schedule them without overlap but it would be nice to have or at least get a warning when overlapping recordings could or would take place.
Overall its a great v1. Savings are impressive against the big boys.
