Advanced Monitoring Web Forms
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Web forms are everywhere and for that reason, they should be
monitored with the same weight if not more than any other page on a
website. Due to some initial
complexities or lack of understanding, it can be hard to monitor a page with a
web form, but it shouldn’t be.
A web form is a web page that contains one or more data
entry fields. It can be as simple as a
newsletter signup that only requires the input of an email address to an
e-commerce system that includes many fields in a form and multiple pages of
forms. Under the covers, simple and
complex forms are handled much in the same way.
In HTML source, a form includes the form tag (<form>),
and one or more input tags (<input>), and a closing form tag
(</form>). There are different
types of input tags: “text”, which accepts alphanumeric text entry and is the
most common, and “submit” which is a button that the user can click to send the
completed form’s data back to the web server.
There are two different ways to send the completed form’s data back to
the server called the form “method”, that are GET and POST.
The GET method takes the forms data and appends it to a URL
which has a limitation of 1024 characters and less commonly used. The POST method is the most common way of
sending a completed form’s data back to the server, and is commonly referred to
as POSTing data.
By POSTing data, one can monitor a web form as if a real
user were entering form data and sending it to the server on a regular
basis. By exercising a form in this way,
one can be assured that a web form is behaving properly when a real human being
is entering and submitting form data.
Since most web forms when POSTed send data to the server for
processing, to be inserted into a database or sending an email, one can expect
a few different aspects of a website application to be tested: the web server
obviously, a back-end database, middleware such as transaction coordinators,
and email servers.
When formulating a website monitoring strategy, ensure web
forms are a key part of it. A critical
web form on your website could be broken at any time, but with the right
website monitoring software keeping a watchful eye, you can lessen the impact
and reduce downtime.
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