A common question from Rigor users is:
Should I use a Real Browser Check or an Uptime Check?
When making this decision we should ask:
For this site or user flow, do we care more about availability or user experience?
Uptime Checks
Sometimes we simply need to know whether a site or endpoint is up or down. If that’s the case, an Uptime Check works great. Uptime Checks capture the server time for a page and allow us to:
- Test the server time for a specific URL, endpoint, or port
- Alert based on response code, e.g. “200 OK”, basic success criteria, e.g. “Text present”, or response time thresholds
Considerations
Uptime Checks do not run in real browsers, so they will not capture any data about the DOMContentLoaded events or onload events on a page.
One benefit of Uptime Checks is that they can run at higher frequencies than Real Browser Checks. By default Rigor allows us to run Uptime Checks up to once every minute, unless limited by specific terms of a customized sales agreement.
Real Browser Checks
Real Browser Checks are ideal for test cases where we need to see how a page loads for a user in a browser or for testing complete user flows with multiple steps. Unlike Uptime Checks, Real Browser Checks:
- Gather the server time, render time (DOMContentLoaded), and load time (onload event) for each page accessed during a check
- Alert based on success criteria, inability to find or interact with an element in a user flow, or response time thresholds
- Run JavaScript in the browser
- Are great for testing responsive or mobile sites because they can run from specific viewport sizes
- Capture screenshots of what the page looked like in the browser at time of failure
Considerations
For Real Browser Checks the metric ‘Uptime’ relates to the number of times that the check ran successfully. If a Real Browser Check hits a page that takes a long time to load or if a Real Browser Check has many steps in a user flow and any of those steps fail, these events would cause the check to fail and trigger an alert. Alerts affect the ‘Uptime’ of the check as reflected in the Rigor app and in scheduled performance reports.
Real Browser Checks can be run up to once every five minutes unless limited by specific terms of a customized sales agreement.