Summary

This watch type is for downloading a web page from a web site so that its contents can be analyzed by WebWatchBot.  The watch type also provides details on the progress, success and failure of the downloaded web page.

Functionality

• Reports response time for entire FTP transaction.
• Downloads a web page from a web site
• Downloads images. (optional) (Referred to as “full-page” monitoring)
• Specify search text (optional)
• Snapshot
• Downloads entire page content for content verification
• Reports HTTP status code, e.g. 404 (Page not found), 500 (Error), etc.
• Supports the ability to save the web page and referenced images to disk.
• Supports authentication to log-in to specified pages.
• Supports the setting of temporary cookies for the duration of the browser session hosted by WebWatchBot.
• Supports form POST-ing along with specific data to post

Why Use this Watch Type?

The HTTP watch type is often used to determine if a web site’s content is being completely served at an acceptable response time by downloading a web page and analyzing its contents.  The two measurements are Response Time - the amount of time that it takes for the packet to make a round-trip - and Content Verification – whether search text can be found in the content.  An increase in Response Time may indicated network congestion or an overall increase in customer use of the web server.

What to monitor

Use the HTTP watch type to test web pages on a web site.  It can be used to ensure that a web page not only loads, but loads completely – by checking for HTML tags.  It can be used to ensure that dynamic pages are serving the correct content:  If a database driven page encounters an error, the web site may still respond, but the web page will not have the intended content.  Specify a search string to ensure the intended content is being served.