Recording FAQs

Q: I cannot record - what next?

A: Follow our Recording Troubleshooting Guide

 

Q: Why do I need to record some pages for Analyzer to analyze my website? Why can't it just scan my site and test all the pages?

A: Analyzer is designed for complex transactional websites that have strict performance goals and are likely to experience performance problems due to architectural, database or business-logic problems. Scanning a website for all the pages is impractical in these cases.

 

Our initial product surveys indicated that analyzing a website in the "spider" manner has little demand - but we are happy to be proven wrong! If you have this need, please tell us! You may vote for the feature request in our issue-tracking system (see the support section of our website and search for "scan website").

 

Q: When I record with Netscape (or Mozilla, Firefox etc), the pages do not look right (or might even have errors) in the Web Page tab of the Content viewer.

A: The embedded browser uses the default browser for the platform - on the Windows platform, the default browser is IE. Therefore, if your site returns content that is optimized for different browsers, the content displayed by the embedded browser (IE) will be the content that was optimized for the browser used during recording, e.g. Netscape. The only solutions are: 1) record with IE, and 2) ignore the differences and errors in the embedded Web Page viewer.

 

Q: Why do all these Security Alert messages appear when I am recording or inspecting a testcase?

A: Because Web Performance products use "fake" server certificates during the recording process in order to decrypt secure pages from the server. See these instructions to silence the warnings.

 

Q: How do I record a site that uses Client Certificates?

A: See the Client Certificates section and the Authentication section.

 

Q: My browser is not recognized. Can I record testcases with it?

A: Yes, if the browser supports HTTP/S proxies. See the Manual Browser Configuration FAQ (next question).

 

Q: How do I configure the browser manually for recording?

A: Follow these three steps:

  1. Manually configure the ports that Analyzer will use for recording so that they will not change each time Analyzer starts. See the General Settings page for more help.
  2. Configure Analyzer to start a custom browser when recording is started (Browsers section of the Preferences page). A custom browser may need to be configured if the browser was not automatically detected. Then the browser configuration should be set as the default browser. See the Browser Settings page for details.
  3. Configure the browser to use Analyzer's recording ports as a proxy. This step is dependent on your browser - see the browser documentation for more information.

 

Q: I have URLs in my testcase from a server that I do not wish to test.

A: If the URLs are not important to the testcase (such as images or links for link tracking, click analysis etc), they can be deleted from the testcase using the Cut item in the pop-up menu for the transaction. These URLs can be added to the URL blocking list - see the Blocking Undesired Transactions section of the manual.

If all the URLs for a particular server (host name) should be ignored, you can use the Host name blocking list, also described in the Blocking Undesired Transactions section.