I’ve got great news to share with you – BrowserMob has been acquired and is joining the Neustar family of services, which includes UltraDNS and Webmetrics!

I started BrowserMob in 2008 with the belief that a combination of cloud computing and real browsers wrapped up in a self-service model could dramatically change how people used load testing. Neustar shares that same philosophy and has built a world-class portfolio of cloud-based performance services that currently has over 3,000 customers. I’m most excited by this partnership because it means that we can now offer our unique services to an even greater audience.

A few months ago Neustar approached us and it was immediately obvious that our visions for website testing, development, and operations were very similar. For example, just like BrowserMob, the team at Webmetrics utilizes real browsers and supports open source and cloud computing initiatives. Even better, upon closer look I found that Webmetrics Load Testing and Monitoring solutions actually complement our own services much more than they compete. Joining forces made perfect sense!

While in the short term nothing will be changing, the long term benefits of this partnership will be an even better experience for all our users. For example, Webmetrics Load Testing provides high quality, hands-on professional services that BrowserMob customers will be able to utilize if they need extra assistance. And for monitoring, BrowserMob customers will be able to benefit from the massive infrastructure and capabilities that Webmetrics already has in place including a global infrastructure with agents in over 100 major cities. Similarly, we expect to bring to the table many innovations of our own over the coming months and years.

Of course our highest priority is you – our customer. I want to assure you that the quality of service you’ve been receiving from us will not change, and that 100% of our team will remain intact and dedicated to making you successful. In fact, effective today both Ian White and I are officially Neustar employees and we are committed to enhancing our solutions and your satisfaction!

Thank you for showing your continued support to BrowserMob. I’m excited to continue working with you and updating you on our plans for a fully integrated BrowserMob + Neustar offering. If you have any questions, you’re of course always welcome to contact me directly.

Patrick
+1 (503) 828-9003 x 101
patrick.lightbody@neustar.biz

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BrowserMob · Neustar · Webmetrics

The BrowserMob team is excited to launch our new API, giving customers access to all their data (including load test results and monitoring reports) through a simple programmatic interface. The API is still in beta and will likely change over the next few weeks, but we welcome everyone to take a look, kick the tires, and send us any feedback.

Currently the API is “read only”, allowing access to load test and monitoring data. We will be adding new services in the coming weeks, including endpoints for creating load tests, monitoring jobs, and working toward complete programmatic access to anything you can do on the BrowserMob website today.

To get started, check out the API documentation. We will be updating the docs as things progress and more endpoints are added. Included in the documentation are links to some simple tools to help you get started quickly, and as always you can email the BrowserMob team if you have any questions.

- The BrowserMob Team

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API · New Feature

Today we’re extremely excited to announce another industry-first in the world of load testing: video capture.

From day one, we always believed that cloud computing ushered in an era where the majority of website load tests could and should be done using real browsers, something no one else had considered before. Doing so made scripting painless, load tests more realistic, and provided better error reporting through the use of screenshots.

Today we’ve raised the bar by also capturing video for every unique failure in a load test. This means that you can now see exactly what led up to the failure and even get a feel for what the user experience was like as your site began to break down.

In addition we also now capture the source HTML (ie: DOM structure) of the web page in the event of a failure, as well as the entire set of request and response headers for the failed transaction. This gives unparalleled information that is simply not available in the traditional load testing approach that relies on headless/virtual users.

We have a lot more great features in store for both our website load testing and website monitoring products, but we’re especially excited about this one. It’s available today so please check it our for yourself and let us know what you think.

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Load Testing · Video

Today we are pleased to announce several major improvements to BrowserMob’s monitoring service, as well as a brand new website:

• Drastically improved charts, including object-level performance charts
• Three new locations: New York City, Amsterdam, and Singapore
• Raw HTTP header captures for any failed transaction
• A brand new website, including a major update to our free Instant Test tool

Please check them out, or continue reading for more information.

Improved Charts

The number one feedback we received with our monitoring product was that while it was fun and easy to script real browsers, the charting left a lot to be desired. So we completely overhauled the charts, making them faster and more responsive. They also now break down each monitoring location use rich, vibrant colors, making it easy to see if you have performance issues in certain geographies.

In addition, we introduced object-level charting. Now when you view an individual transaction you’re going to be able to drill down to view individual object performance over time. Simply click on that element and you’ll be presented with a chart that plots response time for that individual HTTP request, broken down by each geography.

Three New Locations

We’ve added support for three new cloud-based locations, all powered by Voxel, a fantastic CDN and cloud computing provider. They are: New York City, Amsterdam, and Singapore. These locations are currently in beta and their long-term status will depend on how well they perform. So please try them out and let us know what you think. This brings our total locations up to seven, as we already support San Francisco, Dallas, Washington DC, and Dublin.

Raw HTTP Captures

In order to give you better root-cause analysis of monitoring failures, we now give you the ability to view the raw HTTP wire traffic for any failed test. This will tell you what HTTP headers were sent for every single GET or POST issued by the browser. Whether you leverage a large CDN or run a one-server deployment, this additional information should be very useful.

Brand New Website

Finally, we extremely happy to have rolled out a new website and complete UI overhaul for our monitoring and load testing services. In addition, we’ve completely rewritten our free Instant Test tool to make it faster, easier to use, and provide more actionable data analysis. Please try it out and let us know what you think!

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Monitoring · Performance

We’re happy to report that Selenium IDE 1.0.4 has been released. You can download it here and you can find the release notes here.

While this release doesn’t have many new user-facing features, it does clean up several bugs. More importantly, however, is that Adam Goucher and Jérémy Hérault did some amazing work to lay the foundation for a plugin framework. This means that soon you’ll see Selenium IDE plugins that further expand the Selenium IDE capability.

Jérémy is working on one such plugin, called Helenium (see proof of concept in action), that will allow you to do text matching against images and PDF files using optical character recognition (OCR). We’re also working on a plugin that will make it easier to upload scripts from the IDE to BrowserMob.

If you’re interested in how to build your own plugin, I recommend reading Adam’s blog, which has a series of recent posts on how the plugin framework works.

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Selenium · Selenium IDE

We’re always working hard to improve our BrowserMob monitoring and load testing services. Over the last few weeks, we’ve pushed pushed out a bunch of improvements:

New Monitoring and Load Testing Location

Hot off the heels of Amazon’s announcement of a new US West Coast cloud data center, we are happy to report that you can now schedule load tests and monitoring jobs from this new location. Simply select the “San Jose, CA” location when scheduling tests.

Selenium 2.0 Support

In December, Selenium 2.0 alpha 1 was released. This release dramatically improves the realism and reliability of Selenium scripts. We’re proud to say that you can try out Selenium 2.0 support (but keep in mind it’s still in alpha) by simply changing your selenium script from this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser();

To this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser(true);

We will continue to keep BrowserMob up-to-date with all the latest happenings in the Selenium world, as well as donate our time and code back to the Selenium project. We also upgraded all the BrowserMob browsers to have the latest version of Firefox (3.5.7) and Flash.

Schedule Load Test UI Improvements

We’ve also made scheduling a load test a lot easier. We now give you a realtime estimate of what the test will cost you, changing dynamically based on your test configuration. We also display tooltips explaining things like “location”, “ramp”, and “constant”. Finally, we’re really excited to have rolled out a “Run ASAP” option that will kick off the test as quickly as it can, usually within 10 minutes.

New Script Editor

Our users love that they can write their scripts using JavaScript, so we decided to make working on that JavaScript code even easier. By utilizing the Bespin open source project from Mozilla, you now will see a rich text editor with code syntax highlighting. If for some reason you’re having trouble with it, you can always switch back to the plain text editor.

New Load Test Charts

We’ve always been proud of our realtime load test charts, but some users had recently complained that they were too heavy-weight and were slowing down their browser. Of course, this is a perfect example of why performance in the browser is starting to matter just as much as performance on the server.

Responding to this complaint, we rewrote the charts from scratch, moving from YUI Charts (Flash-based) to Flot (Canvas-based). We hope you like them!

New Scripting API Improvements

If you do advanced scripting, especially with virtual users, you’ll definitely want to take a look out the BrowserMob scripting API. We added a whole bunch of useful functions, including:

• setFollowRedirect(true) now logs all intermediate HTTP requests
• You can now automatically verify response codes
• If a 3xx response code is returned when you expected something else, the Location header is logged
• You can tie in “interceptors” for both HTTP requests and HTTP responses, allowing very advanced scripting techniques

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API · Bespin · Flot · Release Notes · Selenium · Selenium 2 · YUI Charts

Yesterday BrowserMob launched monitoring services on two more clouds GoGrid and Rackspace. This allows users to monitor their websites from four different regions now: Washington, Dublin, San Francisco, and Dallas. We are very excited to have added two new clouds since it will giving customers the ability to see how their site loads from different parts of the country and different network paths.

If there is a region that you’d particularly like to see let us know since we plan on rolling out more locations over the next few months.

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We are happy to announce BrowserMob Proxy a new open source tool for simulating network conditions.

Some early functionality:

• It can slow down network traffic, effectively simulating what a low-bandwidth user might experience.
• It can also easily intercept certain HTTP requests (via regular expression), allowing you to mock out unexpected results, such as 500 response codes, long delays is responses, or even unexpected content.

Please visit the main page to sign up for the mailing list, we’d love to get more people involved in the project.You can also go to the  Git project page, where you can check out the source code and report bugs.

We hope you find this tool useful and we would love to get your feedback and improvements.

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proxy · testing · tools

In case you missed our launch announcement on TechCrunch last Thursday I’m here to tell you that we are live. The new monitoring product is now available; take a look at our monitoring video overview.  I’ll be writing some more about the new features and what we are hoping to achieve with monitoring in the future. But for now go give it a try. You can run free monitoring jobs to see how it works.

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Tomorrow night, Wednesday 7/29/09, NedSpace is having a demo night to show off their new space. Come for the free drinks, stay to see us present.

So come on down to Hellzapoppin’ on Wednesday at 4. See the second NedSpace location on NW 5th in Old Town and see your peers show off their cool new projects.

It’s sure to be packed. And it’s sure to be chock full of awesome.

For more information, visit NedSpace. To RSVP for the event, see NedSpace Hellzapoppin on Upcoming. (via SiliconFlorist)

Please drop in and say hi to us.

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