Synthetic User Monitoring is one application out of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations.

Synthetic user monitoring (SUM) is a monitoring application/technology that allows you to monitor the performance and availability of a production web application from a client-side perspective.

Real user monitoring (RUM) and SUM are the perfect combination to understand users behaviour and monitor proactively on-premise or cloud-based application

In this blog, you will discover how to enable the monitoring of your S/4 HANA Fiori applications in minutes.

Benefits

Proactive detection

With Synthetic User Monitoring, you can have a 24/7 monitoring to early detect the performance and availability issues before real users experience them.

Baselining and Benchmarking

Over time, the monitoring data collected by SUM can be used to baseline your application performance to identify areas of improvement and benchmark your applications availability and performance with your historic data.

SLAs Management

Service level agreements are essential to SaaS cloud applications. Synthetic User Monitoring helps you to establish solid and consistent service level objectives.

Concepts

Synthetic user monitoring is based on Scenarios (scripts executed on regular basis with configurable thresholds) that are executed on different Runners.

During scenario execution, synthetic user monitoring monitors web applications performance and availability by inspecting the response status and the response time returned by target Web applications.

Synthetic User Monitoring uses Selenium IDE-based scripts to run scenarios. Selenium is an open source framework dedicated to testing web applications.

In the context of Synthetic User Monitoring, the following Selenium components are involved:

• Selenium IDE: creates the Selenium scripts.
• Selenium WebDriver: operates the Web browser by interpreting the Selenium commands and converts them into action on the Web browser.
• Selenium Grid allows the execution of WebDriver scripts on remote machines (virtual or real) by routing commands sent by the client to remote browser instances.

Pre-requisites

1. You need at least one Selenium remote WebDriver infrastructure to declare a SUM Runner by configuring an endpoint to connect to your Selenium remote WebDriver infrastructure.

Step by Step Setup

Summary

1. Record a SIDE (Selenium IDE) script.
2. Adjust script to declare the SUM steps and the SUM variables.
3. Import the SIDE file into SUM. This creates a new resource listing the scripts defined in the imported SIDE file.
4. Create a new the scenario (choose its name, indicate the corresponding script, …).
5. Associate and activate the Scenario to your Runner. SUM schedules the Scenario executions.
6. Optionally Adjust the Scenario configuration: schedule period, variables, performance monitoring thresholds, …

Step 1: Script Creation

After installing the SIDE record/editor, you record your business application from your Fiori Launchpad.

At the end of the recording, save the script as SIDE file:

Remark: We will explain in a different blog how to setup script steps, variables, how to manage secure variables and how put your test in a Test Suite.

Step 2: Script Import

From your SAP Cloud ALM tenant, start the Synthetic User Monitoring application:

Go to the configuration application and select the “Resources” tab and upload your SIDE file.

Step 3: Scenario Creation

In the SAP Cloud ALM SUM configuration application and select the “Scenario” tab to add a new scenario based on the newly upload scripts.

Step 4: Runner Selection

Select a Runner to execute the scenario. From this screen, you can also manage the frequency of the scenario execution.

Step 5: Monitor the scenario execution

The scenario execution on the different runners can be monitored from the Synthetic User Monitoring application.

The “Execution” view provides a summary on the scenario availability compared to the scheduling of the execution as well as the performance of each scenario execution.