Content Matching False Positive Alerts

Hello Randall,

what do you mean by "false positive". Do you have content check like "page does NOT contain XYZ" and you sometimes get alert that page does contain XYZ, or do you have check "page DOES contain XYZ" and you get alert that page doesn't contain XYZ?

Where exactly did you put wait actions? Screenshot logic takes screenshot of step just before last action in the step, because it's usually something like "click" that navigates to next step. So if you add wait action as a last action in the step, screenshot may not match current step.

In SEUM 1.0 content match action failed immediately if there was no content to match. In 1.5 this was changed and now action waits up to 30 seconds if searched text appears or not. This means that even if SEUM moves on before page is loaded, it still allows page to load for up to 30 seconds before it fails.

As you described your incorrect screenshots, it may mean that SEUM for some reason doesn't correctly transition from one step to another. In this case content match is executed against wrong page. Check how do you transition from one step to another. Is it by click on some link/button? If so, is this link or button present on step screenshot when content match fails?

If your issue persists, you should open a support case so that we can look at it and get some more data to help you with solving this issue.

Hi Jiri,

Thanks for your reply.  I use both types of content matching, but the content matches that I'm getting false positive errors on are all cases where I check for "page DOES contain XYZ".  Almost every single content check of this type errors out on me at least once a day and in the next run (5mins) its back to normal.  Whereas the content checks for "page DOES NOT contain XYZ" are working perfectly and I rarely get them, but when I do they indeed show the correct screenshot.

Below is a screenshot from one of my transactions where I have it setup to check for "Welcome, SiteScope CDARSTwo!" each time it runs the transaction which would tell me that it logged in successfully.  This particular transaction errors out quite a bit and when it does I'm getting the screenshot from Step 3, which is why I added a "Wait 00:00:05 before next action" to step 3, thinking it needs more time to finish loading that page before going onto step 4, where the content check takes place.

In other cases I have the "Wait 00:00:05 before next action" directly before the content match and it still doesn't seem to make any difference.

Any ideas or should I open up a case with Tech Support?

Thanks for your time,
Randall

Some things I would recommend. Firstly I would reduce the content matching to the minimum uniquely identifiable text on the page without punctuation. For example, change "Welcome, SiteScope CDARSTwo!" to "Welcome" or "SiteScope" or "CDARSTwo". Even "SiteScope CDARSTwo" is good since it doesn't include punctuation. That's just a recommendation as some punctuation characters can be misinterpreted as escape characters. They should work fine with SeUM but it's a good house keeping measure when experiencing issues with content matching.

Instead of adding the 5 second wait state you may want to adjust the wait timer on the content match. By default this is configured for 30 seconds, whereby the SeUM player will wait a maximum of 30 seconds for the text to appear before considering the transaction step failed. If this timer has been reduced then I would recommend putting it back to 30 seconds. If 30 second isn't adequate then increase the timer to 60 seconds to see if that eliminates the false positives. 

As aLTeReGo suggested, I would remove wait action and increase time on Content Match action to let's say 60 seconds. What are average durations of step 4 when transaction works? Are they sometimes high, close to 30 seconds? If yes, then it may happen that sometimes page load exceeds 30 seconds and content match fails.

However if suggested steps doesn't help, you should open a support ticket.

Thank you aLTeReGo & Jiri for your help and suggestions.

To answer your questions... I keep the default 30s setting on content matches, because most of my transactions total duration times are under 30s.  The average duration for step 4, in the example I provided, fluctuates between 8s - 18s when its working.  The total duration of the transaction averages 36s, so that one step is, at times, taking half of the total time so you might be onto something

First I'll remove the 5 sec. wait before next action times from the step before the content matches and change the content match default wait time from 30s to 60s. I will also change the content matching to not include punctuations. I don't think I have many content matches that contain punctuation, with the exception of the example I provided.

Thanks again for your help and suggestions I'll make the changes and let you know how it goes over the next couple of days.

-Randall

Thank you aLTeReGo & Jiri for your helpful suggestions, they have made a huge difference so far.  I only had one pesky transaction that was still alerting on failed content match, so I changed the content match for that step to something else on the page now I'll wait and see how well the change works over the weekend.  Kudos to both of you!

Cheers,

Randall