We’re excited about Amazon’s new AWS location. So much so we’ve already started development to bring its benefits to our customers by next week. As such, we had to quickly figure out how to adapt our tools to work with it.

In their announcement, Amazon stated that Elasticfox already worked with the new location. While that’s true, if you tried looking for a new Elasticfox release you’d be in for a surprise: there isn’t one. That’s because it doesn’t need an update to work.

Instead, just fire up your existing Elasticfox installation and click on the Regions button in the upper left corner:

Then add new region with the following endpoint details:

• Name = us-west-1
• URL = https://us-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com

That’s all there is to it. You’re now ready to use the new location with Elasticfox!

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Late last night Amazon released an early Christmas present: a third location for which to run Amazon Web Services. This is important news for BrowserMob customers for two reasons:

• Monitoring – it will be our fifth location from where checks will run from.
• Load testing – it will be our third location from where traffic can be generated from.

We are committed to moving at the “speed of the cloud” and as such expect to have both of these options available in the next week. We’re excited about Amazon’s commitment to continue to provide geographic diversity to their cloud offering, and we look forward to their expansion to Asia early next year.

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I’m a little late to the party (dynaTrace released their product a couple weeks ago), but I wanted to still highlight their very important tool: dynaTrace AJAX Edition. It’s by far the best browser profiling tool out there – and it’s free!

If you’re familiar with Firebug, then that’ll give you a rough idea of what this product does. However, instead of being a “Swiss Army knife” like Firebug is, dynaTrace did a deep dive on JavaScript profiling.

This means that this tool can help identify hotspots and bottlenecks in your client-side JavaScript. And as applications continue to get more complex, this will continue to be a bigger and bigger area that developers need to keep an eye on. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if your server is fast if the client application is getting bogged down due to inefficient JavaScript and DOM calls.

Rather than launching in to a full overview of what dynaTrace AJAX Edition does, I recommend the following three articles:

• A Step-by-Step Guide to dynaTrace Ajax Edition – by Andreas Grabner, technology strategist @ dynaTrace
• dynaTrace Ajax Edition: tracing JS performance – by Steve Souders, chief performance engineer @ Google
• Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer – by John Resig, creator of jQuery

If you’re working on performance optimizations for your site, especially if you are concerned about IE (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?), do yourself a favor and add this tool to your toolset. You won’t be disappointed.

Note: I should add that BrowserMob is a dynaTrace partner and we are continuing to explore ways in which BrowserMob, Selenium, and dynaTrace products can work in concert.

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We get this question a lot: “Is there any way to change the hosts files on the machines that your browsers run from?” – or something similar.

The reason is always because there is a desire to monitor or test a site that doesn’t yet have the final DNS mappings put in place (ie: dev, staging, etc) and the development process has up until now worked by having team members edit their “hosts file”, a small DNS override that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all support.

This hosts file might look like this:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1           localhost
255.255.255.255     broadcasthost
::1                 localhost 
fe80::1%lo0         localhost
 
123.456.789.123     example.com

In here are defaults that the OS configures. This is where “localhost” is actually mapped to your local IP address: 127.0.0.1. And also in this example, the domain example.com is mapped to a fictitious IP address.

While BrowserMob doesn’t allow you to override the hosts file, it does let you accomplish the same goal of remapping a domain/host to a different IP than what is in the public DNS records. All you have to use is the HttpClient’s remapHost API.

This works for Virtual User scripts:

var c = browserMob.openHttpClient();
c.remapHost("example.com", "123.456.789.123");
...

As well as for Real Browser User scripts:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser();
var c = browserMob.getActiveHttpClient();
c.remapHost("example.com", "staging.example.com");
...

As you can also see in these examples, you can map to another host or an IP address.

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