ActiveX for ASM

Products

• CA App Synthetic Monitor
• DX Application Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

Does APP Synthetic Monitor support the installation of an ActiveX control to work with the Full-Page, Firefox, and/or WebDriver monitor types when using IE11 browser emulation?

Environment

APP Synthetic Monitor

Resolution

Webdriver monitor does support IE11, but you have to install an on-premise station plus a separate Windows machine that will run the tests.  Since you have full control over the machine, you can install any ActiveX control into the browser that you want. However, it will not be possible to interact with the ActiveX control from the Webdriver script in any way (cannot click on UI elements in the component, cannot perform assertions on it is content).  Whether this will be any of use to you depends on your specific application and how you intend to determine its availability.

About the procedure:

First, you will need to install Linux OPMS machines:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/app-synthetic-monitor/SaaS/on-premise-monitoring-stations-opms.html

And then connect the Windows "slave" machine to it:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/app-synthetic-monitor/SaaS/using/use-internet-explorer-to-monitor-webdriver.html

Then you will need to tell us what account is owning the OPMS so we would enable IE checks for that account (If enabled for everyone, the checks would be failing without the connected Windows machine so that is why we are enabling it per-account).

The minimal prerequisite is to install the Linux OPMS anyway. Once you would get that up and running, you can move on to install the Windows machine (and enable the ActiveX plugins and all you would need).

 

Additional Information

Note that we did not test ActiveX components or pages with them as that is really obsolete technology, it might be unsupported or posing some unforeseen issues with the third-party tools (Selenium and IEdriver) we are using to make it happen. If the pages are public, we would like the customer to share it first - and also their target IE and Windows versions which would give us a chance to test in our environment to catch any possible issues early on.
Installing the machines is not difficult, but also not really a piece of cake so that having this information can spare you wasting some days installing everything and then hitting a blocker.