Web Performance Monitor (WPM) 2020.2 is now available and can be downloaded from your Customer Portal and solarwinds.com.
What's New in 2020.2?
A great new integration feature with SolarWinds Pingdom, as well as additional feature parity items for the new recorder.
- WPM 2020.2 release notes & system requirements
- Orion Platform 2020.2 release notes & system requirements
Recorder Integration with Pingdom
Some of you may be unaware of this but, there are actually two great SolarWinds tools for monitoring key aspects of your web based applications...WPM and Pingdom! It's been a long term goal of ours to integrate the two and with this release we've started that journey by adding the ability to save your recordings from the new recorder directly into Pingdom. Check out this post for a quick primer on key strengths of each tool and how they compliment one another.
To help you get started with saving transactions to Pingdom I have put together a walk through with a few screen shots. If you already have a Pingdom account you can move on to the screen shots and walk through. If you don't have an account you can sign up for a free 14 day trial by following this link.
After installing WPM 2020.2, you will want to download and install the newest version of the recorder. Once that is completed, you will configure the recorder with an API token from Pingdom. This allows the recorder to connect to your my.pingdom account when you are ready to save transactions. Generate the token by logging into your Pingdom account, click on "Integrations", and then click "The Pingdom API". Once there, in the upper right hand corner click on "Add API Token". You will be able to name the token and you will want to select "Read-Write Access". The next screen will show you the generated token. Be sure to copy this and store it somewhere safe as Pingdom does not store the generated token and you will have to create a new one if you lose it. Finally you will be back at the main API token page and should see your new token listed. Now you can go to the recorder interface and click on the three stacked dots in the upper right hand corner. Select "Configure Pingdom" and paste the token you generated in the previous steps.
Now that you have the token generated and configured, you are ready to create a transaction using the recorder. When you've completed the transaction save to Pingdom by clicking on the "Save" option to the upper right of the recorder and select "Save to Pingdom". You will be asked to name the transaction and then you will be presented with a prompt which will either confirm the transaction has been saved or it may tell you that you need to edit the transaction. There are currently a few recorder features that are only supported in Orion at this time (see table below). It is also important to note that transactions on Pingdom have a limit of 60 seconds for playback so if your transaction is going to run longer than that you'll be prompted with a warning that the 60 second limit has been exceeded. To configure the play back and alerting options you will then return to your Pingdom account, select the transaction, and finalize the check.
| Recorder Features which are not currently supported in Pingdom |
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Feature Parity for New Recorder
Finally we'll discuss the recorder feature parity items included in this release. Many folks have reached out to say they needed better support for authentication via NTLM and certificates. So we've added those capabilities in addition to better support for environments with proxy servers in play. Below are a couple screen shots to demonstrate the new capabilities.
Your Feedback Counts!
Your feedback helps shape our products. We'd love to hear your your thoughts on this release of WPM. Feel free to post comments directly to this entry.
If this release didn't hit on items you were hoping to see, check out our WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON Post or feel free to capture in ideas/ways to improve the product on our Web Performance Monitor (formerly SeUM) Feature Requests area.
Thank you all and we look forward to hearing from you!