Setup of Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM

[Richard_Büffing]

Introduction

SAP Cloud ALM Synthetic User Monitoring allows you to monitor any web-ui based application throughout your entire landscape. It simulates the inputs and clicks from an enduser perspective and as such, Synthetic User Monitoring is the spiritual successor of the Enduser Experience Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager.
In this article I'm going to show you step-by-step instructions on how to setup Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM with a third party Selenium WebDriver provider.

Architecture Overview

In Synthetic User Monitoring you need a so called "Runner" which, in simple terms, is a robot that executes your prepared selenium scripts.
These runners are based on the Selenium WebDriver infrastructure.
So you will need such a web driver infrastructure and for that you have two options:
1. A local on-premise Selenium WebDriver
2. A cloud based 3rd party WebDriver provider.
In this guide we will focus on the cloud based 3rd party provider, depicted in this picture upper half.
The application to be monitored is shown as an SAP BTP application, but it could really be any web application.

Getting a Provider Subscription

SAP Cloud ALM supports a wide variety of Selenium WebDriver providers.
Personally I have successfully tested three of them: BrowserStack, LambdaTest and SauceLabs.
But I suppose any of the providers listed on the Selenium Website will do.
https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/drivers/remote_webdriver/ 
For the sake of fairness, I will not give any recommendation for a specific provider.
I suggest that you do your own evaluation for any of the available providers and their subscription models.
As a starting point you can just signup for a trial account on any provider and then take it from there.

Prerequisites

Once you have your account with the provider of your choice you need the following things:

• Your account information (this is not your normal username/password with your provider!)
• The URL of your Selenium WebDriver
• A Selenium Script: See my blog on creating scripts with Selenium IDE: HERE 

Gathering your account information

For LambdaTest

Log in to your account, then in the upper right corner click on "Dashboard"

Then in the upper right corner click on your account details, then on "Account Settings"

From your account settings click on "Password & Security". Here you can copy your user name and access key (this is not your password).

For SauceLabs

Log in to your account, then from the upper right menu click on the key icon.
Here, again you can copy your user name and access key.

For Browserstack

Log in to your account then from the upper right menu click on the account icon and choose "Account & Profile"

Then from the lefthand menu choose "My Profile"

Here, again you can copy your username and access key.

WebDriver URLs

Depending on your chosen provider you need one of the following URLs:

• LambdaTest: https://hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub 
• SauceLabs: https://ondemand.eu-central-1.saucelabs.com/wd/hub 
• BrowserStack: https://hub-cloud.browserstack.com/wd/hub

Setup in SAP Cloud ALM

For the setup of Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM you are going to create the following components:

• Runners: These are the "robots" that will execute your scripts
• Resources: These are the Selenium scripts that you created using Selenium IDE
• Scenarios: These are the "containers" that glue everyhing together, schedule the execustions and show you the results.

Creating Runners

From the Operations section of SAP Cloud ALM choose the tile "Synthetic User Monitoring".

If this is the first time you access this tile, then you get greeted by a welcome screen.
Click on "configuration"

When you open the configuration for the first time everything is empty, so you need to add your first runner.
In the left menu click on "Runners" and choose "Add" from the upper right area.

From the following dialog enter a name for your runner as well as the data gathered from the Prerequisites section of this blog (URLs and user / access token). Make sure you set the type to "Internet" for cloud based Selenium WebDrivers.

If the registration is successful the result should look like this:

From this view in the "Endpoint" tab you can also adjust further settings or perform a connection test.

Creating Resources

In this step you upload the Selenium scripts that you previously created using the Selenium IDE.
In the lefthand menu click on "Resources", then in the upper right area click on "Upload".

Browse for the Selenium script that you prevsiously created as described in my previous blog.
Create Selenium scripts for SAP Cloud ALM Synthetic User Monitoring
Then click on "Upload"

Creating Scenarios

So far we have runners and resources, we now have to create a scenario holding the two together.
In the lefthand menu click on "Scenarios", then in the upper right area click "Add"

In the "General" section give your scenario a name and a description.
Then fom the "Execution" section chose the script to be executed (you uploaded this in the previous chapter)
Finally choose which business services the scenario should be included in.
There's one created by default, but you can also include the scenario in your own business services.


After the creation, you have to assign a runner to the scenario.
On the lefthand menu choose "Scenarios", then click on the scenario you just created.

From the "General" section click on "Assign" to assign a runner.

Now choose the runner that you previously created:

Finally from the list of runners, make sure the runner is active for this scenario, then save and close:

Business Service Assignment

In order to see results, make sure your scenario is assigned to at least  one business service.
(in my case the assignmend of the previous chapter didn't persist, so I had to do it again here.)
From the lefthand menu choose "Business Services", then cklick on the desired business service you want the scenario to be included. Again this can be the default one (created automatically) or one that you created yourself.

From the "General" section click on the "Assign" button.

Choose the scenario you want to be assigned, it will get added to the list above, then click on the "Assign" button.


The result should look something like this. Notice the Scenario has been added to the list.
You can go ahead and click on the "Close" button.

If you have done everything correctly the final result should look something like this:
Note that in the lower scenario picture I assigned several runners from different providers and also an on-prem runner which will be part of another blog.

Conclusion

We have learned how to register runners from different providers. We have uploaded Selenium scripts that we previously created. Finally we have put everything together in a scenario and assigned that to a business service.