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Player Scalability?

I was reading in the admin guide that the 'Recommended Player Requirements' allow for the following:

"The recommended requirements allow a single Player to monitor up to 50 transactions of 30-second duration at 5 minute intervals. The minimum is 1 minute."

What is the definition of a transaction in this example.  My understanding is that you have recordings that contain steps.  Does this mean 50 recordings?  Does this number scale if the hardware is increased, for example, more CPU and memory on the player server?

  • Yes, a transaction is a recording (that contains steps). And yes, that means 50 recordings that are 30 seconds in length that are played back every 5 minutes.

    Transaction – Atransaction is a recording of web browser steps taken in a particular navigation.

    Step – A step is considered to be a single action within a transaction. A step can be, but is not limited to, text input into a field, a mouse click, a download, and so on.

    Hope this helps.

  • The number can be influenced by hardware specs but there is a law of diminishing returns. Throwing a 16 core, 64gb of ram monster at the SeUM player will not yield 10 times the number of simultaneous transactions it can perform. There are however different factors that contribute to this calculation. The most obvious being the transaction duration. This is calculated when the transaction is saved as a typical value. A 30 second transaction is fairly long for most customers and I've seen as short as 2-5 seconds in some cases for simple transactions. In this case the number of assigned transactions to a player can increase significantly since these transactions are much shorter in duration. The idea though is to calculate the average transaction length across all recordings that are assigned to a player location to determine if you are above or below the 30 second example above.

    The second item that plays into how many transactions can be assigned to a player location is how frequently these transactions are played back. The less frequently they are played back the more worker processes are free to service other transactions. You might for example be able to have as many as 500 or more transactions assigned to a single player if the frequency of these transaction playbacks were once every 24 hours.

  • A recording is recorded in SEUM recorder, you can save it in your database, export to a file or import it. A recording contains steps, which can have multiple actions in it (e.g. Navigate to a certain page on website, click...).

    Once you assign a recording to a Player location, it becomes a transaction. You can assign a single recording to multiple locations, combination of player location and recording is unique and defines the transaction.

    All transactions created from one recording has the same steps and actions. What may differ between them are thresholds, you can define on the "edit transaction" page. These thresholds are by default stored in the recording, but you can specify them different for each transaction.

    Thresholds help you to define, when the status of your transactions is (Up, Warning, Critical or Down..).

  • Are you also confused what is Player location?

    Player locations can be managed in SEUM settings > Manage locations page. A machine, that has installed SEUM player is a player location.

    IPv4 connection must exist between SEUM server and player location. You can also use proxy if you wish. The default installed Player location is Orion server connected to "localhost". Be aware that you cannot connect player on "localhost" address to additional poller to avoid ambiguity.

    Each Player locations must have unique name.

    You can also create a player location on a Cloud machine. If you have an account at Amazon Web Services, create one Using "Add a location in Cloud".