Scripting with Catchpoint Recorder

Today’s tech tip is focused on one of Catchpoint’s web tools that deserves attention: the Catchpoint Recorder.

What is the Catchpoint Recorder? It’s a Selenium-based Chrome extension that allows you to capture, automate, and replay multi-step transactions. Monitoring multi-step transactions as well as single pages is essential to identifying problems and detecting site-wide outages.

The Catchpoint Recorder helps anyone interested in monitoring multi-step transactions. Developers, SREs, and ITOps will all benefit from the ability to identify and troubleshoot problems before end users are impacted. It includes an array of features to make perfecting scripts and debugging straightforward, including auto-complete, syntax highlighting, breakpoints, analytics, built-in screenshots, and play-back. Catchpoint Recorder allows you to get the most out of your continuous testing by sending your finished scripts straight to the Catchpoint platform or export them as Java, C#, Python, Ruby, or HTML scripts.

Today, we’re going to explore using the Catchpoint Recorder to translate webpage clicks into a test that helps you monitor the critical use cases of your business.

How to Use Catchpoint Recorder

Using the tool is straightforward. Once you have downloaded the Chrome extension page for Catchpoint Recorder from the Chrome Web Store, simply navigate to the website you have targeted for testing and begin the process you want to record. Catchpoint will log your actions and turn them into Selenium, a scripting language used in Catchpoint Tests. We’ll walk through each of these steps in this week’s video demo (link below).

Key metrics you can test for include:

• Page load time
• DNS time
• Time to interactive
• Error rate

The wealth of resulting information will tell you a great deal about the buyer’s journey and areas that you need optimizing to improve conversion rates. In an era in which digital commerce is king, it’s evident how important it is to make the buyer’s journey as frictionless as possible. Slow-loading websites have notoriously high bounce rates and low conversion rates. According to Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load.

For any high-traffic site, you will need to monitor multiple paths. You can do this with Catchpoint Recorder by saving your test and scheduling it to run regularly. The Catchpoint Recorder makes it easy to create tests in a matter of seconds. If I had a hundred critical paths to monitor, Catchpoint would effortlessly help me keep track of each one (check out this recent blog on using a growth mindset to maximize your performance monitoring solution from Nithyanand Mehta, our Executive Vice President – Technical Services and GM).

In this week’s video, you will:

• Understand exactly what the Catchpoint Recorder is, and how to locate and install it
• Watch a demo of how you can use the recorder to generate tests
• Get a detailed insight into how to track the buyer’s journey using Catchpoint Recorder
• Determine key health metrics to look for
• Learn how to specify test types and the type of nodes and geographies you wish to run your tests on.

You will also find out what type of data Catchpoint provides following the running of the test. This will allow you to further understand what network elements have the most impact on end-user experience.

Download the Catchpoint Recorder here.