Network Throttling: Monitor the User Experience

Network Throttling

When it comes to monitoring web application performance, not only is it necessary emulate user actions, but also network conditions of end-user devices. Network throttling allows you to control connection speeds to better match the experience of real users, allowing you to see web application behavior in specific network conditions. Network connections can vary for many reasons. User location, device type, and browser used are just a few factors that can affect a user’s experience.

Users can access your websites, services, and applications using any combination of devices, browsers, and connections, from anywhere in the world, so setting up a monitoring device that mirrors the user’s experience is critical. This is why network throttling is so important. For example, network connections of the device you use for recording a monitoring script can be faster than the network connection of a real end user.

Enabling Network Throttling with Dotcom-Monitor

Enabling network throttling begins with the EveryStep Web Recorder. The EveryStep Web Recorder is a free, web-based scripting tool that automates the recording of a browser’s interactions with a website or web application, allowing you to emulate various user scenarios, from very basic actions like button clicks or menu selections, to more complex user interactions, such as form submissions and online path to purchase actions. The EveryStep Web Recorder is also one of the few monitoring tools that allows you to interact with complex application technologies like AJAX, Flash, HTML5, PHP, Ruby, and much more.

Once the script has been recorded successfully without errors and saved, users can go back into the script and drill-down to the step, or steps, where you want network throttling to be triggered. Users can select from one of the following network speed options:

Learn more about enabling network throttling within the Dotcom-Monitor platform.

In addition to network throttling, Dotcom-Monitor users have many more script editing options, including delays, network filters, time watchers, and much more.  Visit our Knowledge Base for a full list of script editing options.