Nagios Check that Simulates Web Full Rendering Time

Question

Does anyone know of a Nagios plugin or cli program that can simulate the load time of a webpage as it would be in a browser.

For example the resulting total load time of something like Pingdom's Full Page Test or the timeline you get from firebug.

Answer 1

Selenium is the defacto standard for full-browser-render testing, so take a look at the "check_selenium" plugin: http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Websites,-Forms-and-Transactions/check_selenium/details

Answer 2

Could you script a browser? You might be able to use AppleScript to tell Safari to load the page and time it, if you are running on a Mac.

I don't know if this is close enough to a 'real' browser for your purposes, but another option is to use HTMLUnit, which is a Java library that is used for things such as User Acceptance Testing, Screen Scraping, and so-on. You could use the same library to time how long it takes for a page to load, but obviously this is a Java engine rather than a real browser so the performance may not be representative of what any particular user experiences. You may also not want to run Java-based Nagios scripts.

Answer 3

Nagios Exchange has a simple PHP-based plugin which checks the load time of a webpage and reports if it takes longer than a specificed period of time. It is called "Check Website Speed"

Answer 4

Maybe Selenium-RC and this? IANAWD/IANAWP, so I cannot say for sure. I have just heard a lot of good things and Selenium before.

EDIT: Yeah, I'm the kind of idiot that did not read the first answer, but proceeded to recycle it. Apologies everybody.

Answer 5

You can create a Nagios check script that starts a web browser. Selenium or the iMacros Firefox/Chrome addons will work fine for that purpose. Both are free and open-source.

Example: Start iMacros for Firefox via the command line and run a small macro like

VERSION BUILD=7110203 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
URL GOTO=http://serverfault.com/
TAG POS=1 TYPE=H1 ATTR=ID:h-top-questions

=> This will give you the exact page load time in Firefox or Chrome. Plus, you can use the same setup for transaction monitoring.