Web Transaction Recorder

Simplify Transaction Monitoring

Transaction monitoring is an important synthetic website monitoring technique. It allows you to simulate visitors’ website interactions or user flows to perform routine checks and receive instant alerts when a transaction fails. Setting up transaction checks can be challenging, however, as it often requires some knowledge of coding. To simplify this process, Pingdom offers a web transaction recorder, which allows users to simply click and browse through the website to set up transaction checks. The recorder saves users significant time and effort because there’s no scripting required. However, if you’re a developer and prefer to write your own scripts, you’ll find the built-in editor in Pingdom highly intuitive, as it auto-suggests steps and validations.

Monitor Critical Transactions

Most web applications rely on several steps or scripts, which need to work in tandem to complete a transaction. For example, a user needs to enter unique credentials (username) and a valid email ID to register for a new account, create a strong password, and enter the correct username and password every time to log in. Apart from registration and user login, business owners might want to monitor the search functionality, shopping cart checkouts, image downloads, form submissions, and more depending on the application. With the web transaction recorder, you can set up transaction checks to proactively monitor whether all the critical steps in a transaction are working smoothly on a routine and automated basis.

Get Started Quickly

The web transaction recorder in Pingdom is currently available for Windows only and can be downloaded here. It’s an external utility, and it installs within minutes. Once installed, you need to create a read-write access token in your Pingdom account under the following path:

Integrations > The Pingdom API >  https://my.pingdom.com/app/api-tokens

Once the token is generated, you need to copy and save it in the recorder application and start recording the steps for any business-critical transactions (for detailed step-by-step instructions, please visit our Help page). After recording a session, you can also edit your tags or modify alerts, intervals, and region settings in My Pingdom.

Perform Real Browser Tests

Getting insight into the end-user or customer experience is critical for every business. This is why synthetic transaction monitoring in Pingdom allows you to test your most important business transactions on the Chrome browser. This helps ensure your interactive functions and Java scripts are fully functional for site visitors. You can test the functionality as often as every five minutes from different probe servers across the globe.

Analyze Historical Data

Pingdom offers unlimited data retention for its transaction reports, which allows you to track and analyze data for as long as you want. The transaction reports are similar to uptime reports, but instead of offering response times, they offer average execution times for the transactions on an hourly average over a period of seven days. The reports also list any outages detected during the transaction tests and offer root cause analysis. When analyzed in conjunction with uptime, page speed, and real user monitoring reports, the transaction reports can help you evaluate the performance and availability of your web applications.