Give us your use cases for WPM

optional and conditional feature was useful

My companies usecase is to go to pages such as status.okta.com and status.office265.com and use the image verification to verify that the service is up or not. This is not possible with text verification.

In all our cases I use it to replicate a user browsing a site in order to test response of certain components - I like the waterfall charting, it can be very useful. On one occasion we had an externally hosted web app that our users were complaining about response time during certain times. After their extensive diagnosis by their support team they pointed the finger in our direction as the cause so I setup a browse to the site every 15 minutes in WPM and several days later presented them with the statistics that proved all was good to the point of entering data into their form and the delay was in their response to the queries, proving the issue was between the app and their database - I had a smug grin on my face that day I can tell you! The image match is useful and just the ease of being able to record logins.

Very handy for checking when items come back into stock on the Thwack store!

one customer was using the conditional blocks for password conditions that needed random characters from your password.

Conditional blocks - We use these to account for things like a password expiration warning popup.

There also needs to be a way to ignore certificate warnings.  It won't even attempt to record if it detects a certificate error.

Kevin

These are features that would make our lives so much easier and help make WPM a better competitor in the synthetic monitoring space.

Conditional steps - very useful for dynamic pages  "if <locators> is found then do <action> (with configurable timeout to wait for the locators object)

Synchronization:

• wait for page to load (with configurable timeout)
• wait for CSS element (with configurable timeout)

FILTER:

• 3rd party filter - filter out requests to URL containing <text>
• resources <filter out .jpg .gif. png etc etc> same as above, really.

Nice to haves:

• Fall back locators? - if an locators  is not found try to locate alternate fall back locators
• Show locators in the editor.

Thanks!!

Don

Will there be any way to suppress alerts, either via an API or via some maintenance window scheduler type of thing, specifically related to synthetics?

For example, there are times when we don't want alerts to fire at all (i.e. off business hours) and other times when we want to put specific synthetic monitors into a maintenance window during a deployment.  Things like that.

I may be looking at this through the wrong lens - perhaps this should be managed via another component of SolarWinds?

You can do some of this now. 

For windows of time that you never want alerts to fire (off business hours), you can define a schedule in the alert itself.  For example in the "Alert me when a transaction step goes down", you can set Time of Day.

For deployment, you can manually "unmanage" the monitor in the Manage Transaction Monitors page.  Once deployment is complete, return to the page and "remanage".

Kevin

One thing I'm not seeing immediately that could be handy is the ability to rotate/randomly set passwords.

Use case: We have an account management page that allows our students to update their passwords. Our developers have written an API call that goes into the backend server and changes a service account's password every 5 minutes.

We would like to replicate this in WPM. Specifically:

- goto the account management website

- login as service account and with password

- click on "change password" option

- enter randomized password (that meets our criteria)

- click to submit password

- validate the "password update successful" text/image we provide

- logoff the account management system

- When the loop is repeated, use the newly set / randomly generated password.

- If the system does not successfully update its password, use the previous one. (more advanced)

We could probably get by just having WPM login and logout, but the full password change process is worth tracking for us.

I just ran into a missing feature that is big for us.  In the deprecated recorder, we could open an existing recording and edit certain actions - things like edit text entry.  So when a password changes, I could open the recording go to the step and change the password, then save the recording.  With the new recorder, I have to re-record the entire transaction.

Please bring back this feature!