Problems following maintenance today (24th April)

Products

• CA App Synthetic Monitor

Issue/Introduction

This morning the webdriver monitors exercised by the OPMS stations were all down, recording code errors -97 and -98 in the log. We verified that all the failed monitors were reporting "Chrome 117" as the browser, whereas they had been set by us with "Chrome." By changing the browser to "Chrome," the monitors resumed working properly.

Why did today's maintenance activity change what was set in the "browser" field, causing a disruption? 

Resolution

1. The OPMS and public monitoring stations are sharing the code base, which means that any release notes related to monitoring stations are automatically related to the OPMS as well and new OPMS is released automatically with a new release or hotfix with monitoring stations' code changes. We will get this into the release notes going forward.

2. The browser without the version number is the newest version available on the station where the monitor is executed. Here is an example.

Before the release 24.4, there were 3 Firefox versions: 91, 110 and 119. All monitors configured to use browser "Firefox" (no version specified) were scheduled on Firefox 119. With the release, the oldest version (91) was removed and a new version 122 was added. The monitors configured with browser "Firefox" would run on 122 after the release. There is a small risk that the new browser behaves in slightly different way and the monitor may start failing as some sites may not work properly with that version.

We recommend to configure the monitors to use the "Firefox" and "Chrome" with no version specified, but some sites may need a previous version (i.e. Firefox 110) as those will always point to the latest versions.