We're
building a new monitor type for Site24x7 - one designed for modern
web and mobile applications that rely heavily on REST API calls to
the function. We'd like to gather feedback from our users, so
please post your suggestions below.
Modern
web applications consist of web pages that use a large number REST
API calls to retrieve data, perform actions, etc. Site24x7's
REST API Transaction Monitor will allow you to perform synthetic
monitoring of web application workflows without the overhead of
running a real browser.
Step-based monitoring
You
can monitor a web application as a sequence of steps. For
example, you can first retrieve a web page, then perform REST
API calls with values present in the page. To monitor a mobile
application, you can first execute a login web view to extract
an authentication token, then use the token for REST API
calls.
Session cookies
The
entire sequence of steps is executed in the same HTTP session,
so authentication cookies or other cookie data set by the
application will be available in subsequent
steps.
HTTP methods
You
can use the GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, and DELETE HTTP methods to
simulate any kind of HTTP request. POST data can be submitted
as a form, XML, JSON, or plain text.
Response validation
You
can validate plain text responses with string checks for
keywords or regular expressions. XML and JSON responses can be
accurately validated using XPath and JSONPath
expressions.
Variables
Individual
values from responses can be extracted using XPath or JSONPath
expressions and saved as custom variables. These variables can
then be used to build custom query strings or POST data for
subsequent steps.
OAuth
You
can authenticate Site24x7 to your application using OAuth, and
monitoring can be performed using the token granted to
Site24x7.
These features are tentative and may change without notice.
The monitor will support the other features from our existing Website Monitor and REST API Monitor as well, such as custom headers, user agent, timeouts, etc. It can be run from all our global monitoring locations, and will support all of Site24x7's administrative features.