Sessions

On this page:

You use the Session view to analyze synthetic sessions. A synthetic session is a record of the complete sequence of events that make up a single synthetic test. A session can cover a single page or, in the case of scripted jobs, can extend to multiple pages.

A session begins at the first navigation start in the sequence and continues to the visual completion of the last page. In the case of single-page sessions, this is equivalent to Visually Complete. Like Browser RUM Analyze and Network Request Analyze, the Synthetic Sessions view lets you analyze results from all synthetic requests as stored in the AppDynamics Events Service.

Sessions data generated by the beta version of Browser Synthetic Monitoring will no longer be accessible once your Controller is updated to 4.2.

Session State

Sessions can have one of four states:

OK: The test ran successfully and returned data.
BROKEN: Your script has an error. You can find the error in the script console output.
- In single URL jobs, the test received a 4xx response.
- In scripted jobs, your script threw an uncaught exception. This can, for example, happen if you try to perform an action, like a click, on an element which is not on the page you are testing.
FAILED: In general, there is a problem with the target of the test.
- In single URL jobs, the test received a 5xx response, timed out or was otherwise unable to connect.
- In scripted jobs, your script had an assertion failure or timed out.
INTERNAL_ERROR: Something failed in the Browser Synthetic Monitoring infrastructure, so your script could not be run. Your account is not charged for any tests that have this state.

Data

The Data screen lets you scan individual requests and allows you to filter and sort to get exactly the data set in which you are interested.

Session Details

Select a specific session and click View Details to see detailed information, including a page load waterfall and tabular details for resources. In multipage sessions, the left navigation allows you to select each page from the sequence.

Business Transactions

If this page was fetched from a backend you have instrumented with AppDynamics, there may be additional details. If there is a icon you can click through to a related transaction snapshot on the server-side. You can also click the Business Transactions tab to see a list of the server-side Business Transactions this request initiated. Click through to the related Business Transaction dashboards.

Script Output

If you used a script to set up this job, you can click Show Script Output to see any script output.

Session Screenshots

Screenshots are taken for all URL tests, but you can also create scripts to take custom screenshots. For URL tests, synthetic jobs will take one screenshot for each page. The screenshot will be of the visibly complete content in the viewport (won't include the browser chrome). For custom scripts, you can take a maximum of 10 screenshots per page. The returned screenshot will either be of the viewport or the entire browser window, depending on the browser.

The Screenshots tab shown below displays the screenshot as a 200 x 150 image. The resolution of the screenshot will be the same as the device where the screenshot was taken.

The Waterfall tab will contain the visually complete screenshot and any custom screenshots (e.g., screenshot2 in the screenshot below) triggered by the script.

Visualization

The Visualization screen provides you with a set of widgets that offer predefined visualizations of the data set you have created, allowing you to create a dashboard.

You can delete, re-add, resize, and drag-and-drop to move all of the widgets.