Browser options

[beta] This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. The options described here configure Heartbeat to run the synthetic monitoring test projects via Synthetic Agent on the Chromium browser. Additional shared options are defined in Common monitor options.

Browser based monitors can only be run in our Heartbeat docker image, or via the elastic-agent-complete docker image. For more information, see Synthetic monitoring using Docker.

Example configuration:

- type: browser
  id: synthetic-inline-tests
  name: Elastic website
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  source:
    inline:
      script: |-
        step("load homepage", async () => {
          await page.goto('https://www.elastic.co');
        });
        step("hover over products menu", async () => {
          await page.hover('css=[data-nav-item=products]');
        });

Contains information on how to run synthetic tests.

Runs the Synthetic test scripts that are defined inline in the configuration. See Synthetics syntax for more information.

This is the most convenient way to get Synthetic tests up and running, however, it becomes harder to maintain and share code as the number of test files increases. The recommended way to run Synthetic tests is to create an NPM project and start writing individual tests for all the user journeys and save them as JavaScript or TypeScript files. Once the project is created, the tests can be invoked either by Zip Url or Local directory method.

Remote zip endpoint configuration allows users to specify the location of a synthetics test project ZIP file.

Under zip_url, specify these options:

If username and password are provided, they will be sent as HTTP Basic Authentication headers to the remote zip endpoint.

Example configuration:

- type: browser
  id: todos-project
  name: Todos Journeys
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  source:
    zip_url:
      url: "https://github.com/elastic/synthetics/archive/refs/heads/master.zip"
      folder: "examples/todos"
      username: ""
      password: ""
      # ssl options apply to downloading the zip, not the browser
      #ssl:
      #  certificate_authorities: ['/etc/ca.crt']

Local directory where the synthetic test files are located.

Example configuration:

- type: browser
  id: local-journeys
  name: Local journeys
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  source:
    local:
      path: "/path/to/synthetics/journeys"

Set this option to add user defined parameters for your scripts. This value takes arbitrary YAML that is then converted to JSON which is then passed into synthetics via the --params option. See Working with Params for more information.

Example:

- type: browser
  id: local-journeys
  name: Local journeys
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  source: # Omitted in this example for brevity
  params:
    root_url: http://example.net
    my_custom_object:
      a_key: ["a value"]

Set this option to manage the screenshots captured by the synthetics agent.

Under screenshots, specify one of these options:

Example configuration:

- type: browser
  id: local-journeys
  name: Local journeys
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  screenshots: "on"
  source:
    local:
      path: "/path/to/synthetics/journeys"

Set this option to true to disable TLS/SSL validation in the synthetics browser. This is useful for testing sites that use self-signed certs. This option can also be used to test certs from non-standard CAs, though you will no longer get errors if there is anything wrong with the certificate.

Set this option to true to enable the normally disabled chromium sandbox. Defaults to false.

Set this option to control the network throttling. By default, all journeys are run with 5Mbps download, 3Mbps upload and 20ms latency which emulates a standard Cable connection.

Users can control the throttling parameters, Below is an example of emulating a 3G connection with 1.6Mbps download, 750Kbps upload and 150ms round trip time in two different supported formats.

- type: browser
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  throttling:
    download: 1.6
    upload: 0.75
    latency: 150

- type: browser
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  throttling: "1.6d/0.75u/150l"

Network throttling can be completely disabled by passing false

- type: browser
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  throttling: false

Set this option to filter journeys based on journey tags and names.

Example configuration:

- type: browser
  id: local-journeys
  name: Local journeys
  schedule: '@every 1m'
  filter_journeys:
    tags: ["browse", "checkout"]
    match: "login*"
  source:
    local:
      path: "/path/to/synthetics/journeys"

A map of extra options to pass in to the synthetics agent. These are used as the context for the Playwright browser object. See the playwright browser context docs for more information.

Extra arguments to pass to the synthetics agent package. Takes a list of strings.

You can configure Heartbeat run monitors exactly once then exit, bypassing the scheduler. This is referred to as running Heartbeat in "run once" mode by setting heartbeat.run_once: true. All Heartbeat monitors will ignore their schedules and run exactly once at startup. This is an experimental feature and is subject to change.

Note, the schedule field is still required and is used by Heartbeat to set the expectation around when the next run will occur. That duration is encoded in the monitor.timespan field in the Heartbeat output.

# heartbeat.yml
heartbeat.run_once: true
heartbeat.monitors:
# your monitor config here...