Agents Administration - Tests
 

Configuration of HttpTest

The details of the Http test that emulates a user accessing a web server are provided below. Since this test can be executed from a location external to the web server, this test presents an unbiased external perspective of the state of the web server.

The default parameters associated with this test are as follow:

  • The TEST PERIOD list box helps the user to decide how often this test needs to be executed.
  • In the HOST text box, the host name of the component for which the test is to be configured has to be specified.
  • The port number to which the web server is listening to has to be mentioned in the PORT text box.

  • This test emulates a user accessing a specific web page(s) on the target web server to determine the availability and responsiveness of the server. To enable this emulation, you need to configure the test with the URL of the web page that it should access. Specify this URL against the URL parameter. If required, you can even configure multiple URLs - one each for every web page that the test should attempt to access. If each URL configured requires special permissions for logging in, then, you need to configure the test with separate credentials for logging into every URL. Likewise, you need to provide instructions to the test on how to validate the content returned by every URL, and also set an encoding format for each URL. To enable administrators to easily configure the above per URL, eG Enterprise provides a special interface. To access this interface, click on the encircled ‘+’ button alongside the URL text box in the test configuration page. To know how to use this special interface, click here.

  • Whether any cookies being returned by the web server need to be saved locally and returned with subsequent requests need to be specified in the COOKIEFILE text box.

  • The host on which a web proxy server is running )in case a proxy server is to be used) has to be specified in the PROXYHOST text box.

  • Specify the port number on which the web proxy server is listening in the PROXYPORT text box.

  • Specify the user name of the proxy server in the PROXYUSERNAME text box.

  • Specify the password of the proxy server in the PROXYPASSWORD text box.

  • Confirm the password by retyping it in the CONFIRM PASSWORD text box.

  • A user agent is a computer program representing a person - for example, a browser in a Web context. Besides a browser, a user agent could be a bot scraping webpages, a download manager, or another app accessing the Web. Along with each request they make to the server, browsers include a self-identifying User-Agent HTTP header called a user agent (UA) string. This string often identifies the browser, its version number, and its host operating system.

    Some web sites may have been designed to service only those access requests that contain the User Agent (UA) string in the HTTP request header.  If this test has been configured with the URL of such a web site/web page, then you have to instruct the test to include the UA string in the header of every connection request it sends to the configured URL; if this is not done, then the test will fail. In this case therefore, set the value of the INCLUDE USERAGENT IN HEADER flag to true. By default, this flag is set to false, indicating that the requests this test emulates do not contain the UA string by default.

  • In the TIMEOUT text box, specify the maximum duration (in seconds) for which the test will wait for a response from the server. The default timeout period is 30 seconds.

  • DNS lookups can cause significant delays in rendering a webpage which will adversly impact the user experience. To avoid such delays, administrators may want to know how long the DNS server takes to respond to the requests. To help administrators in this regard, this test reports the DNS response time measure when the REPORT DNS TIME flag is set to Yes. By default, this flag is set to No indicating that this test will not report the DNS response time measure by default.

  • Sometimes, this test may not be able to access one or more URLs configured against the URL parameter in the first attempt due to various reasons such as poor network connectivity, server busy, etc. In such a case, this test will not report measures related to connectivity and responsiveness of the URLs. For the test to report measures continuously, you can use the NO OF RETRIES parameter. In the NO OF RETRIES text box, specify the number of times that the test should retry accessing the URLs after the first attempt failed. For instance, if you set 2 as the value of this parameter, then, this test will retry accessing the configured URLs for 2 times after the first attempt failed. Note that this parameter

  • If multiple components of the same component type are awaiting configuration, then an APPLY TO OTHER COMPONENTS button will appear in this page. Clicking on this button will allow you to apply the configuration to all/selected components of that type.

  • Once the necessary values have been provided, clicking on the Update button will register the changes made.

When changing the configuration for specific components, a “*” beside the text box corresponding to the parameter signifies that these values have to be manually configured by the user. The parameter values that require to be configured will typically be prefixed with a “$” or contain a series of “*”. A value of "none" in the parameter value indicates that the corresponding parameter value can be changed if required.