In Practice: Accelerating Experience monitoring with SaaS script templates

by Joseph Ochs on April 30, 2019

Network monitoring solutions, by design, should help bring clarity into your management stack. Armed with this clarity, your team can start taking rote tasks out of your day-to-day to help streamline network management from the ground up.

Every convenience we can provide -- no matter the scale -- to help speed up deployment or make AppNeta Performance Manager easier to navigate gives your team back time they can focus elsewhere. For a while now, we've been working with customers to tailor deployments to their needs when complex scenarios or apps are concerned. Our support teams have gained invaluable expertise and sought to store that information where it could be accessed externally.

That said, we’ve created a collection of Experience Workflow templates that you can now use to speed up the configuration of your most popular apps within AppNeta Performance Manager’s Experience monitoring. We’ve listened to our customers and took stock of the programs that are most frequently used, and designed these scripts/templates to make setup seamless. Now, you can start supporting your most business-critical applications with a lot less runaround.

And while these templates were created around the most popular applications customers have been monitoring, they only scratch the surface of the variety of tools we’re able to monitor for.

Here’s how you can start putting these scripts to work.

Follow the link to the Public AppNeta GitHub site containing our repository of Experience scripts.

In this repository, each folder contains a unique README.md file with specific details regarding the Experience Target (the URL that is entered into the Monitor to... section when configuring a Web App Group - see image below) as well as any specific variables that will need to be defined for the script to work.

Please note: variables are already included in the provided scripts, so it is imperative that the variables be defined exactly as written to be valid when used by the script.

The html files in each folder contains the script described by the title, pre-formatted to be copy and pasted straight into the AppNeta Performance Manager Workflow creation screen.

How to use the scripts provided

To insert the scripts, simply select the entire body of the appropriate .html file here in GitHub and copy that data to your clipboard.

Once that data is in your clipboard, navigate to the Web App Group page in AppNeta Performance Manager and select Configure, then click on the Workflows... section (see image below) to enter the Workflow editor.

Once in the editor screen, you'll be presented with a tabular view with just a single entry that says open:

On this page, you'll want to click on the Source tab in order to get to the xml view of the script. From the Source tab, select all of the items inside of the code box by either highlighting or clicking and performing a Select All command to highlight the full body of the code. You can then simply paste the copied script (from the earlier step indicated above) over the selected text. Once done, switching back to the Table tab will show multiple inputs as illustrated below.

The next steps in the process include renaming the workflow to be something meaningful (which is especially useful if you are going to be configuring multiple workflows for a single application) and then defining the variables as outlined in the README.md files for each of the script groups.

Renaming the script:

Defining variables:

When defining variables, it is extremely critical that the name of the variable (i.e. username, password, etc) match the case of the variables listed in the script README.md files. The script will fail if the case and spelling do not match exactly.

It’s important to emphasize that we can support many more apps than just those we’ve provided script templates for. To learn more about our capabilities, reference our extensive resource library or reach out today.