[rescue] Web transaction monitoring

[Steve Hatle]

All,

As I manage a bunch of different websites and services my little side
business hosts (on various old Sun, Alpha and Compaq hardware- to stay in
the neighborhood of topic), I'd like to do some checking that websites are
actually working, as opposed to just being "up".

For example, go to the site, log in, move around filling in text boxes
and/or radio buttons, committing, and checking for the appearance or lack
thereof of certain strings or page elements, and then log out.

Alerts would need to be generated if the expected responses were not
received. A bonus would be to keep stats of transaction times overall and
moves between pages, etc.

I've not found any of this functionality in Big Brother/Nagios or their
add-ons, but I haven't dug too much into them.

I'm aware of pay products like SiteScope (which I liked) that has this
functionality, as well as external companies like Keynote, Empirix, etc.
that offer these services.

Seems to me, though, that someone has already invented this wheel in the
open source world.

I'm currently using Big Brother for a lot of monitoring, so integration with
that would be a plus, but I'm not opposed to setting up another system for
this functionality.

TIA,

Steve