Changelog

2023.03

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Improved scrollbar visibility.
  • Enabled scrolling with PageUp/PageDown in each pane of the script editor and elsewhere.
  • Added pagination to the Traces table instead of embedded scrolling.
  • Added friction when deleting a project, to prevent accidental deletion.
  • Fixed a bug that caused extra long bot group names to prevent tests from starting.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented your notes from appearing on shared test reports.
  • Added a direct link to the Traces section in the test advice section of a test report, to aid in debugging.
2023.02

Comment Blocks

Many users have requested a way to add comments in a script, so you can remind yourself what’s going on in the surrounding steps or just to improve readability. Comment blocks are just that.

You can also put comments in a code block or eval block with the ordinary JavaScript comment syntax.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a memory leak in the script editor that caused slowness when playing a large browser script with many screenshots.
  • Increased the internal limit for browser bot file uploads in a code block from 20mb to 60mb.
  • Fixed a broken admin toggle on the Team page.
2023.01

Modifier Keys

Some web applications support clicking with modifier keys, like a spreadsheet that lets you Shift+Click to select multiple rows. You can now do this in a code block by passing an array of modifier key codes:

browser.click('.row:nth-child(2) .cell:nth-child(5)', { modifiers: ['Shift'] });

Similarly, for keyboard actions, you can string the key codes together like this:

browser.keyboard.press('Control+F');

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a browser memory leak in the script editor, which caused the editor to become sluggish after playing a long browser script with many screenshots.
  • Fixed a problem with the right and left cursor errors when editing a wait time.
2022.12

Report URL Path Simplification

If you’ve load tested an API or web application with dynamic tokens embedded in the paths (like /users/131476/profile or /companies/fcabac8d-8b88-11ed-8b19-12104280a3f7), you might have noticed a lot of similar URLs cluttering your test report.

Loadster can now automatically collapse these dynamic sections to show URLs that are logically the same (like /users/_/profile or /companies/_) so their response times are aggregated together. To enable this, go to the Report section in Settings and select Strip URL path parameter values under Report URL Path Simplification. This setting takes effect for all subsequent tests.

Load Test Report Improvements

We’ve improved the Next Steps section that appears at the top of a load test report. This section is automatically generated after the test finishes. It calls attention to any errors that happened during the test and explains their likely cause and whether each error was likely load-related (the result of an overloaded site) or functional (the result of a scripting problem or a data problem).

The errors are now grouped together more clearly than before, and we summarize your site’s overall response time measurements.

Also, Next Steps now calls attention to any CPU utilization problems in the load test infrastructure, since an overloaded engine can cause inaccurate response time measurements, timeout errors, and other problems.

Duplicate Projects

You can now duplicate a project with all its scripts, scenarios, and datasets with a single click. This can be helpful if you want to load test a different version, instance, or environment of your site and want to use the previous setup as a template or simply keep the results separated by project.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a broken link to the dashboard that was sent out in some automated emails.
  • Fixed a problem that caused Timeline cards to not immediately appear when steps were playing from an included script.
  • When Timeline cards result from steps in a code block, they will now focus the code block when you click the title.
  • Prevented exceptionally long URLs from clogging up the test result metrics pipeline.
  • Improved error messages for rate limiting and other less common conditions.
  • Improved the test report layout for tests with lots of scripts.
2022.11

Browser Bot URL Instrumentation

You can now add extra instrumentation to measure the performance of background requests made by your Browser Bots. This includes asynchronous requests to your API or a 3rd party API, background scripts, etc.

Previously it was difficult to measure background request timings, because the ordinary Response Times graph only includes navigations when the browser URL changes, but does not include background requests that happen once the page has already loaded.

To capture timings on these background requests, you can now add extra instrumentation for specific URLs or URL patterns. The configuration for this is in the Browser Bots section of Settings.

You can enter one or more URLs or partial URLs (substrings), and any request made by the bot’s browser to a matching URL will trigger a sample with timing.

Instrumented URL timings will then show up in the load test report on a new graph called Instrumented URL Response Times.

Trace Limits & Filtering

Loadster captures traces to give you more visibility into what’s happening with individual bots in a load test.

The Traces table in a load test report now allows you to customize which columns appear, and filter the traces by column values. You can also search traces for a particular value.

This makes it easier to find the traces you’re interested in when you’re trying to figure out what went wrong in a test, or when you’re simply trying to spot-check that everything went right.

Because the trace data is quite heavy, not every bot can take a trace every time, but we’ve increased the limits to 250 info traces and up to 750 error traces per bot group. Previously each bot group could only take 500 traces of any type, which sometimes caused error traces to be omitted, particularly for errors that occurred late in the test.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • The registration flow is now mobile-friendly once again.
  • When launching a cloud cluster, Loadster now shows you more frequent updates about the launch process as instances are added to the cluster.
  • Subscription cancellations now take effect at the end of the current term, instead of immediately.
  • The Loadster Engine Docker image now specifies a high-numbered UID/GID to reduce the chance of UID clashes with the host system.
  • Improved the handling of special characters in file names, when using Files steps in browser scripts.
  • Fixed an inconsistency in the color of the finished test progress bar for tests with errors.
  • Fixed a race condition that occasionally caused launch instability in very large cloud clusters.
  • Fixed a regression that prevented file uploads from Browser Bots in a load test.
2022.10

Refreshed Scenario Editor

The scenario editor got a redesign, to make editing each bot group more straightforward.

You can still access the advanced options by expanding the gear menu to the right of the number of bots, if you want to impose an iteration limit (per bot or per group), simulate a slower network, override DNS entries or variables, etc..

Running Bots by Group

The Running Bots by Group graph is now a stacked area graph instead of a superimposed area graph.

This makes it easier to see each area and also to easily tell the total number of running bots at any moment.

New Methods in Code Blocks

We added a few methods for identifying which bot is running, in case you need to add bot-specific branching logic to your code blocks.

bot.getBotNumber();         // Index of this bot in the group, starting with 0
bot.getBotGroupNumber();    // Index of this bot group in the test, starting with 0
bot.getIdentifier();        // Unique string identifier for the bot

You could also send these to your server if you want to correlate requests to which bot they came from.

Export Full Graph Data

Clicking on the small clipboard icon in the top-right corner of each graph will now copy the full graph data in a tabular format, so you can paste it into a spreadsheet for further analysis. Each row represents a short time window (2-second resolution for short tests, and longer resolution for longer tests). Each series in the graph has its own column with aggregated data points in each time window.

This data was previously only available in the JSON download and required parsing.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Added an indicator when series are hidden on a graph with many series.
  • Fixed a bug with the response size validator that only happened in a load test, not in scripting mode.
  • Fixed a connection leak that occasionally happened with long-running engines running lots of browser scripts.
  • Improved the speed with which finished tests are cleaned up and test reports are generated. Previously these could get a bit backed up if several load tests were finishing simultaneously on the platform.
2022.09

Graph Timestamps on Hover

The time series graphs in the load test report now show a hover line with the precise timestamp when you hover the graph. This makes it easier to correlate spikes or errors with data from your APM system or server logs.

Trace Filtering

You can now filter the traces in the Traces section of your load test report, to easily find traces for a particular URL or error message. The table now includes trace error messages (if any) so it’s easier to find the trace you’re interested in without clicking on them.

Request Details in Protocol Traces

Traces from Protocol Bots now include details about the HTTP request, not just the response. Clicking on a trace will reveal all the request headers, and usually the request body as well, as long as the body length didn’t exceed a set limit. This makes it easier to tell what your bots sent that resulted in the errors.

Faster Script Playing from North America and Europe

We’ve deployed dedicated bare metal script players for the North America and Europe regions. If you designate one of these regions as your Script Player in Settings, your scripts will now start within milliseconds in most cases.

Speedway Limit Emails

Speedway now emails you if you are approaching or have exceeded the maximum monitoring requests or robocall and text message notifications for your Speedway plan. This gives you notice that your monitors may stop running you or stop notifying you if the limit is exceeded, so you can decide whether to upgrade your plan or wait until the limits reset next month.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug in Speedway that prevented deletion of notification policies when in use.
  • Fixed a bug with Ctrl-C/Cmd-C copying text from the script logs in the script player.
  • Introduced browser.setCookie() as a way to set cookies from outside the browser in code blocks.
  • Fixed a regression with browser.setFiles() in a code block. Ordinary Files steps were unaffected.
  • Improved font legibility in the Variables dialog.
  • Increased precision of sub-second response times to 3 digits.
  • Fixed a minor scrolling annoyance that occurred after saving a long script.
2022.08

Delayed Start for Bot Groups

By popular request, there’s now a way to delay the start of certain bot groups in your load test. This allows stair stepping patterns and other creative patterns for ramping the load.

The delayed start option is hidden under the wrench that appears to the right of each bot group.

Individual Keypress Actions for Browser Bots

Testing certain kinds of web apps (WebGL games, etc) requires generating individual keypress events in the browser window. This is different from typing text into an input field, so we’ve exposed a simple way to do it in code blocks.

browser.keyboard.press('ArrowUp');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowUp');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowDown');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowDown');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowLeft');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowRight');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowLeft');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowRight');
browser.keyboard.press('B');
browser.keyboard.press('A');
browser.keyboard.press('Enter');

bot.wait(3000);

browser.screenshot();

Any plain character or a value from KeyboardEvent.key is acceptable.

Where the keypress event gets handled depends on what element on the page has focus. Your script might need to click on an element first to focus it, or click somewhere on the body to remove focus from an element if you want the keypress to be handled at the window level instead.

Speedway Updates

We’ve been busy with Loadster’s companion product, Speedway. Speedway lets you use your Loadster scripts, or new scripts, for 24x7 Site & API Monitoring.

New in Speedway this month is the ability to map different Notification Policies to each of your monitors. For example, you might want certain critical monitors to send immediate SMS messages to everyone on your team, and also raise the incident in PagerDuty and email everyone. Less critical monitors (like for your a staging site) might just email a single person.

Notification Policies are now more flexible, too. You can set a policy to delay notifications until the monitor has been in a failing state for a certain amount of time (like 10 minutes), so they don’t wake you up for network blips or issues that quickly took care of themselves.

Watch this space! There are exciting developments in the works for Speedway. It might even get its own Changelog soon instead of bumming off Loadster’s.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • We’ve created a better getting started experience after creating your account. If you’ve been a Loadster user for a while, you’ll never see this. If you’re a new user, you won’t appreciate it either, because you didn’t have to do it the old way.
  • Improved performance loading the Traces table in a test report for tests with lots of traces.
  • Improved the generation of text selectors in the Loadster Recorder browser extension, for sites where the same text exists in multiple places.
  • Links to invoices in emails when you complete a purchase are now permalinks. You can now access the Stripe invoice and receipt months later.
  • Fixed the average response time calculation on the tile at the top of the test to be the average of all groups in the test, when there are multiple groups of bots. Tests with only one bot group were unaffected. The values in the Average Response Times graph below were similarly unaffected.
  • Fixed an issue with clicking on a title in the Timeline selecting multiple steps in the editor, so it wasn’t clear which step the card correlates to.
  • Changed the formats.base64decode() function to return a byte array instead of a string. Returning the decoded value as a string was kind of pointless because Base64 is mainly used to encode things that aren’t strings.
2022.07

New Features & Improvements

  • We’ve simplified the onboarding experience for new accounts, to streamline the path to create and play your first script.
  • The script editor now defaults to a layout that shows the Logs and Results/Timeline tabs side by side.
  • Login and registration pages now load a lot faster.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a usability issue with dropdown menu buttons, making it possible to close the menu by clicking outside it.
  • Fixed performance issues related to large datasets bogging down the editor.
  • Fixed an issue with bot numbers in the Traces table being incorrect for large distributed tests.
2022.06

New Features & Improvements

  • The new “Request Count” column in the “Total Time Spent” table of the test report now indicates how many total requests were made to each URL in your load test.
  • There’s now a double-click option for click steps in a browser script. Previously you could only double-click from a code block, not an ordinary click step.
  • You can now resize, sort, and hide columns in several of the test report tables.
  • The Request Content-Type field in a protocol step is now a combo box, with common defaults.
  • The dataset editor once again has undo/redo history.
  • Code block HTTP operations like http.get now synchronously return a response object, for easier control flow. Previously you would have to grab it from a validator function and store it in a higher-scoped variable.
  • We’ve improved alphanumeric sorting in the projects list and elsewhere.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue with bot reservations sometimes not being released immediately when a cloud provider lacks capacity for a big load test.
  • Fixed a problem that prevented errors from Evaluate steps from showing up in the script editor logs.
  • Fixed a type coercion issue with typing non-strings from code blocks.
  • Fixed some usability quirks with removing request bodies in a protocol script.
2022.05

Copy/Export Test Data

Need to get your load test results into a spreadsheet or external system for further analysis? It’s now easy to copy tabular data by clicking on the small clipboard icon at the top-right of any graph or table in the test report. The copied data pastes nicely into Google Sheets or your other spreadsheet of choice, and it’s easy to parse as tab-separated values if you want to do something custom with it.

Global Custom Headers

You can now set global custom headers for both protocol scripts and browser scripts. Global custom headers will be sent with all outbound requests, regardless of destination. You can set them for Protocol Bots and Browser Bots in a code block using http.setGlobalHeader(name, value) and browser.setGlobalHeader(name, value), respectively.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Completed the migration of the Loadster dashboard to Vue 3.
  • Replaced the 3rd party dataset editor with a custom grid component.
  • Enabled smart redirect for unauthenticated users, to send you to the login page if you have previously logged in from the same browser.
  • Updated the browser script recorder to automatically include wait times if there are more than a few seconds between recorded steps.
  • Clarified a help message when viewing details on a trace.
  • Made it more straightforward to tab between fields in the script editor.
  • Separated Loadster and Speedway invoices so they only appear in their respective apps.
  • Fixed an intermittent bug with the test page title being outdated.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the Terminate button to be obscured when stopping a test.
  • Made the checkout flow default to your country and tax number if you’ve entered them previously.
  • Deprecated the X-Loadster-User header in favor of custom user-defined headers.
2022.04

Better Project Page Test History

The project page has been improved to surface more information about recent load tests, with a map of cloud regions, links to the related scenario and scripts, and high-level stats. It’s no longer necessary to click through to the full test report if you just want to see high-level test metrics. The scripts, scenarios, and datasets are still reachable from the project page in much the same way as before, but they have been pushed to the sidebar.

Revised Activity Feed

We’ve redesigned the Activity Feed widget on the Loadster dashboard, to make it more comprehensive and surface more information about tests. This way it’s easier to find a recent test, regardless of project, and see what your teammates have been up to.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug in the Loadster Recorder browser extension that caused trouble recording events in nested frames after a nested frame navigation.
  • Improved the Loadster Recorder browser extension to prevent redundant navigations from being recorded after clicking a link.
  • Fixed a bug with the test launch logs that showed cluster activity from other tests, if you were running multiple tests at once.
  • Fixed a bug affecting the iterations limit in certain situations.
  • Eliminated harmless warnings when launching a Loadster Engine in a Docker container.
  • Improved filtering of jsessionid parameters from URLs in test results.
  • Clarified the USD currency on the billing pages.
  • Added support for recording from old-fashioned frame elements to the Loadster Recorder browser extension, in the same way we handled iframe elements previously.
  • Added the ability to override the typing delay for browser.type(...) in a code block.
  • Added the ability to set custom timeouts for browser.waitFor(...) in a code block.
  • Surfaced a read-only historical view of the script steps on a load test.
2022.03

New Features & Improvements

  • Added the ability to open a new browser window or tab from a code block.
  • Added a silent option for clicks and other steps when called from a code block. With this option, the step will be carried out if possible, but if it fails the script will continue without error.
  • Made it possible to stop a script immediately, even if it’s in the middle of a code block, without waiting for the code block to finish.
  • Improved report filtering for tests with many distinct URLs, to prevent the Response Times graph legend from becoming unintelligible.
  • Improved the size and layout of the trace modal.
  • Improved the display of n-month plans on the Billing page (such as a custom plan that renews every 6 months).

Bug Fixes

  • Ironed out apparent data inconsistencies between the Live View and Report View. The data was correct, but inconsistent because each view was showing data from different time windows.
  • Made the step number in the timeline always correspond to the step number in the editor after running a test, so you can more easily relate screenshots to the step that took them.
  • Fixed a performance issue with accessing very large response bodies in code blocks or JavaScript validators/capturers.
  • Fixed a bug that caused Browser Bots to ignore the “Display interpolated URLs in reports” setting in some situations.
  • Fixed issues with stripping out URL parameters or truncating the query altogether in the reports.
2022.02

Graph Overlays

You can now overlay one graph on top of another, both when running a load test and in the test report after it finishes. Mix and match different graphs to show the relationship between different metrics, like the effect of running bot count on response times or errors. You can overlay graphs from the sidebar while a test is running, or at the bottom of the test report after a test finishes.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Improved the quality and consistency of automatically generated selectors when recording a browser script.
  • Enhanced the notification center to relay broadcast system messages in case there’s a partial outage.
  • Changed the engine utilization graph legends to show the full group name instead of just the engine region, so it’s clear which cluster each refers to.
  • Fixed a bug with the Loadster Recorder extension for Chrome, now using the browser extension Manifest v3.
2022.01

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a rare issue with shaking tiles in the Timeline.
  • Fixed a keyboard focus issue that sometimes caused steps to be deleted inadvertently when editing a URL.
  • Fixed an issue with timezones in the Activity Feed.
  • Extended the Traces TTL to 30 days.
  • Improved messaging for when a script is deleted that’s in use by one or more scenarios.
  • Redesigned the Play and Fast Play buttons in the script editor.
2021.12

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Made single bot scripts play in AWS Lambda instead of shared engines in most regions, for greater reliability.
  • Enabled self-service username changes instead of requiring you to email support - finally!
  • Removed the “Launch test with manual start” feature.
  • Made Browser Bots send the X-Loadster-User header like Protocol Bots do.
  • Fixed a bug with deleted engines showing up in the Script Player dropdown.
  • Fixed a scrolling issue with the script editor caused by hitting the space bar while playing a script.
  • Improved a misleading error message when timing out after a click action.
2021.11

Browser Bots: Camera & Microphone Support

Browser Bots now provide a dummy camera and microphone device, and automatically grant permission to them, if the pages you’re testing ask for it. The devices are stubbed out and send uninteresting video and audio streams. You don’t actually get to see the bots looking into their cameras, sadly.

Browser Bots: File Inputs

Browser Bots can now use the Files step to interact with file input elements, like <input type="file"/>.

When you choose a file in your script with this step, the file content becomes part of the script, so you can run the script out in the cloud or on a self-hosted engine without needing access to your local filesystem.

There’s also an equivalent way to do this in a code block, but you’ll have to encode the file’s content as Base64 yourself, like this:

browser.chooseFiles('input[type=file]', [
    {
        name: 'cat',
        contentType: 'image/jpeg',
        contentBase64: 'UklGRuZ/AABXRUJQVlA4INp/AABwrAGdASr0AQACPjkYi0QiIaET...'
    }
]);

Report URL Simplification

Your Loadster reports include a graph with a breakdown of response times by URL. Each unique URL from your load test is a separate graph series. Normally this is super useful, but it gets messy if your test visits too many unique URLs. For example, your bots might get redirected to a dynamic URL that’s different each time, and showing each of these dynamic URLs as a separate graph series is unhelpful.

To tidy up your graphs, we’ve added a new setting to Settings, called Report URL Simplification. Possible values are:

  • Leave URLs as-is (in their full unaltered glory)
  • Truncate URL query strings (remove the whole query string, starting with the question mark)
  • Strip URL parameter values (keep the query params, but replace values with underscores)

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that caused iterations per group to be ignored with small numbers of bots.
  • Made the Halt script execution on any error setting apply to individual actions within a code block, not just the entire code block.
  • Stopped background navigations within nested iframes from showing up in the Response Times.
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the Timeline and Logs to get stuck when stopping a script early in the editor.
  • Made our home-brewed iframe selectors work with all the CSS attributes.
  • Added the step number to traces so you can tell which step generated the trace.
2021.10

Clobber-Resistant Script Editing

If you and someone else on your team happened to be editing the same script, there was a danger that you might clobber each other’s changes. We’ve added some guardrails to prevent this with a recent update.

You’ll now see a user badge appear at the top of the script editor whenever someone else on your team also has that script open. The editor will also double-check that you have the latest copy when you go to save it, and alert you if someone else saves a copy in the meantime.

Protocol Bots: Global Headers Per Domain

Since time immemorial, Protocol Bots could specify custom headers for each individual request, but that could get pretty tedious if you’re testing an API that requires the same headers on every request. Thankfully there’s now a way to set a default header per host in a code block anywhere in your script, like this:

// Add a header to all future requests to a host
http.addHostHeader('slothereum.cc', 'X-Slothentication', 'ymmv2880');

// Remove host headers matching a host/name/value
http.removeHostHeaders('slothereum.cc');

Once you set a host header, all requests your Protocol Bot makes to that host will automatically have the header, until the end of the script or until you remove it.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Clarified the error message when trying to choose a non-existent option from an HTML select.
  • Added the monthly test hours consumption to the billing dashboard, so if you have a plan with an hours limit you can see how many you’ve used.
  • Updated the Loadster Recorder browser extension to ignore _ngcontent-* and similar unreliable properties when crafting selectors.
  • Fixed buggy pagination on the Total Time Spent table of the test report.
  • Improved the quality and specificity of error messages from Evaluate steps.
2021.09

Browser Bots: Select Options by Value, Text, or Index

We’ve made it easier to choose the option you want from Browser Bot Select steps. Now, you can specify an option by text, by value, or by index. Consider the following HTML:

<select name="countries">
  <option value="CR">Costa Rica</option>
  <option value="HR">Croatia</option>
  <option value="CU">Cuba</option>
</select>

To choose Croatia, your step can specify CR to select by value, "Croatia" with double quotes to select by text, or [1] with square brackets to select by index.

Browser Bots: Manage Multiple Browser Windows

We used to assume that each Browser Bot would only control a single browser window or tab at a time. Not anymore! Now you can toggle between browser windows, close a window, and list the bot’s browser windows programmatically in a code block.

// List all of the bot's browser windows/tabs
browser.listWindows();

// Get the bot's currently active browser window/tab
browser.getActiveWindow();  // 0, 1, 2…

// Focus a different browser window/tab
browser.setActiveWindow(0); // the bot's original tab
browser.setActiveWindow(1); // the first opened tab
browser.setActiveWindow(2); // and so on…

// Close a browser window/tab
browser.closeWindow(1);

Each Browser Bot starts out with a single window, but if your site opens links in another tab or pops up another window, it will be added to the list.

Speedway Site & API Monitoring

We’re pleased to announce Loadster’s sidekick application, Speedway, for Site & API monitoring!

You probably noticed the monitoring feature in Loadster this past year: run a Loadster script on a schedule and get alerted if anything goes wrong. It’s kind of like Pingdom or Uptime, but with more powerful scripting.

This monitoring approach is often called active monitoring or synthetic monitoring, and it’s an important part of the site reliability stack. Active monitoring is highly recommended if you want to be alerted of site downtime and breakage, especially if you want to test multiple pages or endpoints back to back.

The scripting is the same, but the motivations and methodology are a bit different between load testing and monitoring.

Reusing your load test scripts for active monitoring (and vice versa) saves time on script creation and reduces the effort of maintaining your scripts, while making sure you can react quickly to problems and be proactive about it.

Read more about Speedway »

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • Added the full results from Scrape and Evaluate steps to the result details, which you can see by clicking on the card in the Timeline.
  • Clarified the users per team limit on the Team page.
  • Clarified the confusing error message when a Wait For step times out.
2021.08

Traces

Browser Bots now capture traces whenever an error occurs, and the first bot in each group captures traces of every step regardless.

Traces show up on the Traces tab of your live test, and in the Traces section of the test report.

They include:

  • A screenshot of what the browser looked like at that moment
  • A waterfall chart of resource timings from the page
  • Detailed error messages from the browser automation library when available
  • The bot number, step number, and URL where the error occurred

Read more about Traces »

2021.07

Browser Bots: Wait For Element Steps

Web applications often have overlays, progress indicators, or deferred loading of components to improve the user experience, particularly for slower actions that can take a few seconds to complete. This makes sense from a UI perspective, but it can present a challenge for automated testing because the thing you want to interact with might not be there yet, or might be covered up by something else.

With the new Wait For steps, your Browser Bots can wait until the element achieves a certain state before continuing.

Browser Bots: Select Steps

We seem to have overlooked <select/> dropdowns in the initial Browser Bots release, so there was no easy way at first to select an option. That’s fixed with Select steps.

Browser Bots: Hover Steps

Most of the time, building automated tests for a web application doesn’t require explicitly hovering on things before clicking them… but sometimes it does. The most obvious example is a fly-out menu, where you have to hover the menu title and then the contents fly out, exposing things you can click on.

If you need to hover something, you can now do so with the new Hover steps.

Include Scripts in Scripts

Reusability! Composability! Finally, you can include one script in another, so you can keep frequently used sequences of steps in one place.

For example, you might want to have your login flow in a script called Login, and include this at the beginning of all the scripts that require logging in.

Read more about how it works in the Include Script FAQ.

2021.05

Multiple Team Support

User accounts and Loadster teams are now a many-to-many relationship! Before, your Loadster account was tied to a single team, but you can now join multiple teams and easily switch between them.

This is helpful if you consult with different companies, or just want to use Loadster for personal projects without intermingling them with your company’s account.

If you’re linked to more than one team, you’ll see a team switcher at the top of your dashboard. Just choose another team from the team switcher to switch teams.

If you’re an admin on your Loadster team, you can invite someone else to join on the Team page just like before. If they already have a Loadster account at that email address, they’ll simply be linked to your team upon accepting the invitation. Your friend can then bounce between your team and any other teams they are associated with.

Similarly, if you’re an admin on a team and want to remove someone from the team, you can also do it from the Team page. Once you remove someone, they’ll still have a Loadster account and will still be able to see their own personal projects and those of any other teams they’re associated with… they just won’t have access to yours anymore.

2020.10

Browser Bots Have Entered the Arena!

Most web load testing tools, including Loadster up until now, require you to automate your load tests at the HTTP protocol layer. Scripts were basically a sequence of HTTP/S requests, chained together, with validators and capturers bolted on when necessary. This approach made testing pretty much any web application possible, but not always easy.

For some web apps, testing at the protocol layer is actually quite difficult, especially when you have to capture parameters from a server response and use them in a subsequent request. Scripting OAuth and SAML flows at the protocol layer can be particularly cumbersome because these flows require a lot of capturing and regurgitation of special tokens.

Our new Browser Bots make scripting such complicated interactions a whole lot easier, because they control real headless Chromium browsers.

Scripting with Browser Bots is made up of user actions like navigate to URL, click on element, type text into an input field, and so on. You don’t have to worry about every individual HTTP request, because the browser figures that out for you. Automation at the browser level especially shines for testing complicated web applications with a lot of client-side logic or convoluted authentication flows.

What about the old v-users or virtual users? They aren’t going away, but from now on we’ll call them Protocol Bots. Protocol Bots are still ideal for load testing HTTP APIs (REST, GraphQL, etc) because they give you precise control of each request. They generally work fine for simple static sites too. And testing with Protocol Bots, when practical, is very affordable: they only consume 1/4th as much Loadster Fuel as Browser Bots.

In short, every time you create a script, you’re free to choose the right bots for the job: Protocol Bots when you want to work at the protocol layer, and Browser Bots when you want to automate real browsers.

2020.07

Loadster + Slack, Opsgenie, and VictorOps

We’re pleased to announce three new Loadster integrations: Slack, Opsgenie, and VictorOps. Whenever a monitor fails or recovers, you and your team will get notified through the right channels so you can take action quickly.

Read the full announcement about Slack, Opsgenie, and VictorOps »

2020.06

Loadster + PagerDuty

Loadster now integrates with PagerDuty! If you’re using Loadster’s Site & API Monitoring, and want amped up notifications, escalations, and on-call rotations, look no further than PagerDuty.

Read the full announcement of our PagerDuty integration »

2020.05

Goodbye, Loadster Workbench

Rumors of Loadster Workbench’s demise have not been exaggerated. It’s officially EOL as of May 1st, 2020. Let’s thank Loadster Workbench for all the good times, and look forward to more good times to come while moving faster on the web platform.

Read the full Loadster Workbench EOL Announcement »