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.
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.
Selenium is the defacto standard for full-browser-render testing, so take a look at the check_selenium plugin
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.
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"
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.
Maybe worth a look: phantomjs-nagios: "Render an complete Webpage headless and test load time with nagios".
Here you can find a list with some website speed tests: https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Websites,-Forms-and-Transactions