How to Use the Recorder to Build a Transaction in Web Performance Monitor - Video

Learn how to use the intuitive transaction recorder to set up a transaction you want to monitor in SolarWinds^® Web Performance Monitor.

Web Performance Monitor helps you quickly find and fix issues with your critical, web-based applications or the infrastructure behind them and watch their critical transactions to ensure everything is running smoothly.


 

SolarWinds® Web Performance Monitor helps you quickly uncover performance issues for your internal and customer-facing, web-based applications.

WPM's transaction recorder captures how a user interacts with your website or web app with no scripting required. Simply enter the website you want to monitor, and then go to the page where you want to start recording.

Once you're ready, hit "record."

Now, navigate through the pages to complete the steps of the transaction, just like a user would.

In this example, we are going to recreate the path that an end user might take to download a trial version of Server & Application Monitor.

In this case, we also want to add a text verification to the final step, to make sure the user ends on the download page. To do this, we will verify that the last page includes the words "thank you."

Once you're done, you can play back your recording to make sure you captured everything you wanted.

Next, rename the transactions so that you can easily identify it in your dashboard.

You can set up the transaction to play from one or more locations. This allows you to track user experience from multiple locations. For example, you'll know if employees in a remote office are having issues accessing one of your business's web-based applications. Simply navigate to the Transaction Locations tab, and select what is relevant for that recording.

Depending on the transaction and/or location, you may want to adjust the timing thresholds. For example, you can adjust the value of a critical warning in order to minimize the triggering of false alarms. And you can even adjust by location to account for network latency in remote locations.

Next, you can add node or application dependencies. WPM lets you set dependencies on transaction steps, as well as the overall transaction. By tying nodes and applications to transactions, you'll be able to determine if there are issues with the underlying infrastructure, and then quickly drill down to find the root cause.

That's it! You're ready to start monitoring.