Knowledge Base

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SOASTA CloudTest locations define geographically separated groups of servers. This could be any of the following: Sets of physical appliances located in different data centers Different Amazon EC2 regions (e.g. U.S. And E.U.) Different computing cloud vendors In addition, a location can be used to represent a "simulated" computing cloud environment, for testing purposes. When configuring a location, one of the key considerations is whether or not servers within that location can be contacted from "outside". This decision is usually made for you by your network administrator. For example, when using physical data centers, your firewall will either allow external access to individual servers, or not.
Creating a New Location To create a new location, select Central list > Locations, and then click New. The New Location dialog box appears.
Enter a name and optional description for the new location. In addition, you can provide a geographic location. For example, one that describes where a data center is physically located. This information will be used with the Activity Map dashboard [see Interacting with Activity Maps] available in some editions of SOASTA CloudTest. For example, this could be set to a city and state like "Austin, TX", a complete address like "1234 Main St., Austin, TX", or a country name like "Ireland".
If you are setting up a location that defines a computing cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2), then select the Cloud Type from the drop-down. For example, choose from among GoGrid, Windows Azure, Amazon EC2 or Simulated.
If you are setting up a location that defines a computing cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2), then select the Region from the drop-down. For Amazon EC2, the options are us-west-1 us-west-2, us-east1, and eu-west1. For Windows Azure, the options are asia-east, asia-southeast, europe-north, europe-west, us-north, and us-south. For IBM Development & Test Cloud, the options are EHN, RTP, ap-jp-dc1, ap-sg-dc1, ca-on-dc1, and us-co-dc1. For Rackspace Cloud, the options are DFW1, LON3, and ORD1. Keep Enabled checked (unless you're configuring a disabled location for later use)
Check the Repository Clustered box if you have multiple machines running the complete CloudTest product (as opposed to just multiple Test Servers). Otherwise, leave this box unchecked. Specify a Cluster Protocol, either UDP (for multi-casting) or TCP (for no multi-cast).
SOASTA CloudTest Services SOASTA CloudTest provides five background services. Checking a box for a given service places the default URL value into the entry field for each checked box. Check the box beside a given service to use its default location. Alternate locations can be typed into the entry field. For each checked box in the list, ensure that the URL is as expected. Click the Key if the service requires HTTP authentication. At this point, refer back to your network setup. If the individual servers in the location can be contacted from outside, then you are done. Otherwise, you will need to provide URLs that a server outside the location can use to contact SOASTA CloudTest. If individual servers within the location cannot be contacted from "outside" (e.g. due to firewall restrictions), then there must be some single host name or IP address that can be used. Typically, this is a load balancer. When using this setup, the location must include URL’s that a machine outside the network can use to contact SOASTA CloudTest web services. If the individual servers within the location can be contacted from "outside", then these URLs are optional. Test Server The Test Server is a test engine, implemented as a massively multi-threaded service, which executes all or parts of a complex test composition. A single Test Server node is capable of sending and validating responses to thousands of HTTP messages per second. Multiple Test Servers can be combined to each execute parts of a large load test that can scale out to tens and hundreds of thousands of virtual users. Test Servers can be geographically distributed and single test compositions can be geographically distributed while still producing a single integrated set of test results and analytics. Repository The Repository is the underlying database layer for SOASTA CloudTest. Results The Results Service generates all of the analytic data presented via the Analytic Dashboard widgets. Coordinator The Coordinator is vital for those tests that involve the use of: Browser actions HTTP recording HTTPS recording Monitoring sessions Specifically, those monitoring sessions that involve the use of the Conductor (you can monitor without the Conductor which would also mean without the Coordinator). Monitor This service provides resource monitoring (hardware, network, load balancer, firewall, Web server, database, application server, content management system, etc.).
Click the key for any checked service to enter further credentials.
Click OK to create the location as configured.
Manage an Existing Location Click Central list > Location to display the location list. Click the Location to display its details in the sub-pane below.
You can change any of the Location settings from the sub-panel. Click Dependencies to display all objects that depend on this object. Listed objects must be deleted before this location can be deleted. See Servers to learn about configuring the individual server(s) within a location.