Configuring a Single Web Page (BrowserView) Device

How to Create Devices

• • Creating a Device

Bulk Import

To create monitoring devices in bulk, choose the Bulk Import option that is provided for the WebPage monitoring devices on the Select a Monitoring Type page. For more details, please see the Bulk Import | Web Page monitoring, HTTP/S, and PING/ICMP devices article of the wiki.

Configuring a Request

During a BrowserView device configuration, you will be prompted to adjust the following basic settings under the Targets tab:

URL(required)

Enter the URL that you wish to test. The address should be formed exactly as you would use it in a browser, such as http://www.example.com. You must include the http:// or https:// at the beginning of the address.  You may include any GET parameters at the end of your URL.

Browser Type

Select the desired browser platform from the following choices: Edge, Firefox, Chrome, or a mobile device.

Depending upon which browser type you selected above, the Browser Version field will appear. Here you can specify a specific version of the browser you wish to use in the test.

Time Validation Threshold (in seconds)

Enter the number of seconds you expect your task should be completed in case you would like to receive an error if this threshold is exceeded.

Ignore Certificates Errors

Allows you to disable the detection of any certificate issues.

Record Video on Each Run

Record Video on Each Run will record a video capture for every single monitoring session. If this option is not turned on, the task will only record a video on the first session of a day that errors or on the first error detected from a location in a given error period.

Simulate a Return Visitor

If you want to see how a web page performs for a frequent visitor, or someone who already has elements from the page cached, you can turn on the return visitor flag on the task edit screen.

Simulate a Return Visitor immediately revisits the web page a second time and only records the results of the second visit. Results may differ from a first visit (which always starts with an empty cache) based upon how the browser handles certain items, such as the expiry of elements on the page.

Response Time Calculation

Response time is commonly considered as the time passed from the end-user request in a real browser to the particular event during the page loading process.

Choose from the following options to calculate Response Time for:

• Full Page Load. Calculation of Full Page Load time is started when a site visitor initiates a request and stops when the entire page’s content is displayed in the browser window (the loading spinner has stopped spinning). To put it in another way, the time includes server response time and download time of all sub-resources like images and CSS (the Load Complete End event).
• Network Times Only. Selecting Network Times Only is useful if you are interested in a pure server response and download time of the page elements, and not in how long it takes an arbitrary end-user machine to render the page. It still sends a browser agent of the type specified above – and the server may send a different response based upon the agent specified. The time between network requests (e.g., JavaScript was executing) is not taken into account during the network time calculation, so verification for completion timeout is applied to pure response time.
• Navigation Timing Event. This option brings up a selection of particular time points in the page loading process. Some correspond to DOM events, others describe the time at which internal browser operations of interest took place. For descriptions of a particular event parameter, see https://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/#sec-navigation-timing-interface.
• First Meaningful Paint. If this option is selected, the time to load a page’s primary visible content (the visible text, images, etc.) is calculated. The paint that follows the biggest layout change is taken into account. For example, the time to render the majority of the search results for a search engine page is calculated. Paints with only the page header, navigation bar, or loading indicator such as spinner icon don’t qualify. 

*Additional Insights. Additional reports can be created to audit performance, SEO, and other website metrics automatically. For more information on how to create Lighthouse Monitoring with Dotcom-Monitor, visit our Wiki article on Lighthouse.

Disable Video Recording & Screenshots

By default, when Dotcom-Monitor loads a web page in a browser window, the system captures video of the web page requests execution. Once recorded, the video is included into Online Report for troubleshooting purposes. If you do not want to record video of monitoring requests execution, e.g., for security reasons, you can disable recording and screenshots features altogether.

Please see Securing PII: EveryStep Video Recording Management to Protect PII for more details.

Browser Mode

Dotcom-Monitor can send monitoring requests through a proxy or directly. By default, all monitoring requests will be sent directly from monitoring agents.

The Browser Mode option allows to quickly activate the proxy to send requests in the Tunnel mode or switch back to direct requests.

Keywords for Content Validation

Content Validation Keywords are used to ensure that the expected content was loaded onto a web page. In the Keyword fields, you can specify one or more words or phrases that you wish to search for in the web page content.  If the expected keywords are not found, the task will return an error.

You can enter multiple strings into the keyword fields.  The values you enter can be separated by logical expressions as follows:

{[("keyword1"&"keyword2")|!"keyword3"]}

Where:
{[ – keyword expression start;
]} – keyword expression end;
() – grouping brackets;
& – logical AND;
| – logical OR;
! – logical NOT;
“string” – a keyword.

A successful keyword expression must include the start and end brackets as follows:

{["keyword"]}

Basic Authentication

The HTTP authentication protocol is used to allow users to access content on some websites.

The following authentication schemes are available:

• Basic Authentication: This method encodes the username and password in base64 and sends them in the request header. It’s simple but not secure unless used with HTTPS.
• Digest Authentication: This scheme hashes credentials using a nonce (a random value) before sending them over the network, providing better security than Basic Authentication by preventing replay attacks.
• NTLM Authentication: A challenge-response mechanism developed by Microsoft, NTLM is used for securing credentials in Windows environments. It provides strong security by using multiple hashing and challenge-response protocols.

Once provided, login credentials will be passed along with the request header to the web server.

• Username: contains a username for HTTP/S  authentication.
• User Password: contains a password for HTTP/S authentication.

Do not confuse HTTP authentication with other authentication schemes such as Bearer Authentication that involves bearer tokens and OAuth 2.0 that uses access tokens.

Read the articles on Basic Authentication Username and Password and Monitoring OAuth 2.0-based APIs for more information.

Download Filter 

Expand the network element filter section and add a filter rule to ignore certain elements, such as images, Flash, or CSS, so they are not downloaded. You can use this to filter out elements that return an error. For example, you could ignore files that end in .js, .css, or .png. Or you could ignore files that contain google or jquery, etc.

There are two types of rules:

• Ignore elements corresponding to the mask.
• Download only the elements that correspond to the mask.

Each “Download” and “Ignore” field has three possible values:

• Start With. Each referenced object which starts with this string will be filtered.
• Contain. Each referenced object which contains this string will be filtered.
• End With. Each referenced object which ends with this string will be filtered.
• Equals. Each referenced object which is equivalent to this string will be filtered.

DNS Options

The DNS Options feature allows users to choose how domain name server (DNS) requests are conducted during a monitoring task.

To specify the mode of resolving hostnames, in the DNS Resolve Mode section, select one of the available modes. For more details on the feature configuration, see DNS Mode Options.

The Custom DNS Hosts section allows to set up the mapping of IP addresses to hostnames. IPv6 and IPv4 DNS resolution is supported.

To specify the mapping, enter the IP address and the hostname in the corresponding fields.

See also: DNS Mode Options.